Hi everyone - hope your day has been going well!

Recently, I've taken part in Improve My Game Jam 22 as a fun little experiment to see if I could go back and make some improvements to Pivotal that I've felt were important to make. Pivotal is sort of a hobby project for me where I love to train my Unity and game programming skills, and this past week (and few days) has been really nice. I've made quite a few changes over the past few days, so here's the gist of it:

New Main Menu / UI

I'm going to be honest - the main menu served its purpose, but it did quite a horrible job at it. Every time I showed the game to someone, and they saw the UI / main menu, they didn't seem all that impressed. But, most importantly, I felt like the menu and UI didn't do its job in an effective way. I've spent way too long revamping the UI and main menu to get that smooth and polished look and feel that I really wanted. The difference is pretty remarkable when you look at it in game - try it!

The level complete menu was having some issues, and combined with my lack of time, I had to keep the old one. This will be addressed very soon.

Music

One of the biggest complaints from when I originally made the game for the Blackthordprod Game Jam was the lack of audio. I felt that it wasn't the best idea to include anything since I felt that no audio is better than bad audio, but I've come through on this update. There's no sound effects yet, but I did add some music to the game to make it feel more chill. The music is global for the most part, with the exception of The Gauntlet receiving its own music. I did some digging for some royalty free music to fit the game rather than composing, but I'm pretty happy with the results. I also added a cool effect where going in water puts a low pass on the music to make it simulate what you'd hear underwater. It's pretty cool!

Oh, and if you desire, you can turn off music with the settings menu - just adjust the slider and you're good.

Redone Mechanics

I've readjusted the mechanics of the game to make Pivotal feel better to control and play - I wasn't able to incorporate everything into this jam, but I got quite a few things down. Here's what's new for you to try in this update:

• The life system is completely gone. You can hit walls as many times as you like without fear, and levels won't feel as rushed compared to before. Though it's not in this update, there is a new scoring system in its place that will still provide challenge to the player. Oh, and beating the best time too.
• Movement was redone to make it feel smoother and less buggy. Also includes a slight speed and acceleration boost to make the game a bit snappier.
• I readjusted controls to make them feel more natural for keyboard users. Controls may be inverted as well, if that is what you want. Right now, controller support is slightly broken, but this will be fixed in a follow-up patch.

The Rest

My goals for this game jam involved improving the game by polishing what is there so it's a lot more playable and presentable. Here's a list of some extra features that I added:

• Adjusted visuals of water to appear cleaner
• Reworked level select screen as part of New Main Menu to be easier to navigate
• Polished some small details
• Maybe a few secrets as well? ;)

Postmortem

The work that I've put into this game over the past week has been exhausting, to say the least. Having work and a social life and all that to balance is hard. I definitely wish I was able to implement some other changes that I had planned, such as reworks to the levels or the new scoring system I had created. But with the new main menu and how the game is looking right now, I'm quite satisfied. I do think there's more work to do to make the game more complete, but as of right now, the game is in a much better state than it was last week. Plus, going back and improving your own work is always fun.

I don't have big plans for Pivotal besides an update or two to iron out the kinks that this update introduced as well as getting to what I wasn't able to, but I would love to make a few videos discussing my thoughts and feelings on the game's development. I think that keeping Pivotal as a hobby project rather than commercializing it is the best route, as it keeps the development of this game a fun exercise rather than a groggy mess to appease as many people as I can to make a few extra bucks. I do have other projects in the works that I do plan to sell, but Pivotal is a project that I just like to work on for fun to hone my skills. Please let me know what you think of Pivotal, and be honest!

Take care,

Billy