I was really happy with the new visual style I had developed over the previous few months of development, but what I had done up to this point was really just conceptual stuff and nothing that would really function properly as a game, so I had to start thinking about the kind of things I wanted to be in the game and how I would represent them in this new style.
First off, I simplified the design of the buttons that line the bottom of the screen to give them a bit more energy, and gave them some functionality so they spawn particles when they're popped which get sucked in by the player, refilling their energy or health bar depending on the colour, and also emit a laser type thing that will take out enemies.
At this point I was still interested in trying to implement the Zoetrope frames, but was starting to be a bit more open to just abandoning that altogether if I felt it wasn't working. I also changed the background colour so I could play around with the enemy colours a bit more.
I wanted to implement a simple multiplier system as well (the multiplier bar increases with every enemy kill and when full ticks up the multiplier, or ticks it down if you take too long and the bar empties), so I had a look at some other Norman McLaren films to get some ideas for how it might look, and ended up going with this design based on the visual representation of the sound track on a piece of film...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmSzc8mBJCM&feature=emb_title
I'm still not 100% convinced on this design, but it's been there ever since so I'll probably end up sticking with it!
So most of the basic elements of the game were in place now and I was pretty happy with how it was looking, but the placeholder enemies felt like they were sucking some of the energy out of it, so the next period of development was focused on coming up with a few enemy types while trying to maintain the visual language I'd established...
