Coming in the next release, we decided to overhaul our Runes Idle and Hold state animations.
We’ve been polishing various parts of the game and realized we had forgotten to take a deeper look at the screen you see the most: the Runes. When looking at the Runebook and interacting with the board, we felt it really lacked juice. So we started coming up with ideas on how we could bring some life to the Runes in their idle state, and at the same time upgrade our Hold animations to fall in line with those new ideas.
After brainstorming, we really wanted to tie the idle state of the Runebook into the intro Comic in the game. In the Comic, you see the Runes floating above the book, suspended by some sort of magic; we wanted to try and capture that feeling.
Once we added simple idle animations to our Runes, we set out to enhance the Hold animations. At this point we weren’t sure whether the Runes should be floating up above the book in their Idle state, or their Hold state.
We figured the natural animation between floating and not floating, would be a small bouncy animation of the Rune slamming back down into the Runebook. So, we created the two states: “floating” and “not floating”. At this point we had a pretty fluid animation between the two states and started working towards polishing them and testing out tons of variations to see what fit best.
Through testing these variations, I always had something in the back of my mind which I wanted to prioritize above all else: Clarity. Something we nailed with the original animations was clarity. There was no confusion around what was being held, and what was not. In most of our new iterations, although they looked extra juicy and quite nice ;)… they just weren’t hitting the mark in terms of clarity.
At this point, we’d been through so many iterations. We attempted to remove the original hold seal visuals and colour them to their respective rune, to reduce their visibility, etc. In the end, we decided the best thing to do was leave the original hold seal how it was, add some small smokey idle particles to give it a bit of movement, and scale it down with our new animation states.
What we were left with were two pretty satisfying animation states that hit the mark on clarity and visual juiciness that we wanted to bring the core up to.
Once we had finalized the new animations, we wanted to address another problem we were seeing fairly often from our community. Initially, new players had a hard time understanding that a match must connect from the left-most matched rune.
Something we wanted to do for a while was to better show match previews, which was previously shown upon hovering the Spell Line Bookmark. The first thing that shot out to us was, why don’t we show these previews on held runes? So we tested out a version where held matched runes would connect.
After these nice new match previews were in place, we wanted to add some movement to them to try and solidify that Spell Lines start from left to right. To do this, we added a pulsing shine that moves across the match preview lines. It’s subtle, but the devil is in the details. We think it will help hint to new players about how the game works.
