"My God, It's Full of...."

I've added two new features to the Implosion game. First, stars. When the player clears a level he or she earns a star - the purple stars appear under the game grid, and the player may collect quite a few of them. If the player has a star, he or she may use a three-finger swipe to use it - doing so lets them advance to the next selector. This is quite handy if the player is having trouble matching the current shape.

I had a little bit of trouble getting the star to show up. I am getting better at blender - I was able to make the star pretty easily, and got the vertices colored nicely. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to show up in the game. Then I realized that I had created the star in a backup copy of the implosion folder - so it wasn't associated with the current version of the game! Doh! This "encouraged" me to learn how to copy objects from one blender file to another. (Here's the online resource I found.)

The second thing I did was add an "on-deck" selector shape to the screen. This lets the player anticipate what is coming next, and make a better decision about whether to use a star. It took a pretty short amount of time to get it working, so that was nice. (Of course, that means there's probably a bug it it that I haven't noticed yet....)

Next up: It's time for me to get the timed obstacle chips up and running. These pieces can't be selected - after a while they "pop" and replace themselves with a random chip of the original four flavors. This is what the original purple ring chips are for, but I want to have a way to indicate the progress of the chip towards popping. Again, I'd like for it to be something that makes sense from any angle, and although I could do a radial effect like the timer, I think I would like it to look different. My current thought is of a "fan-shaped" obscuring object that disappears over time. We shall see.