UI, Particles and Bugs!

A day late because I was out demoing the game at a local WIP event. It was a useful, if not productive experience for two reasons. One, I discovered a bug in unlocking so those who gave it a try only managed to try it in the most simple mode. The problem ended up being super silly. I had made some changes to how I collect values used to unlock stuff and as a base for achievements. In one change a line of code calculated a value... then proceeded to do nothing with it returning the default value. The other reason it was useful is it made me appreciate I still have a long way to go on trying to demo my game. Dishpig is usually played on mobile, so I had those. The other four games being shown were all PC, so they had big screens, controls (one very elaborate) and such. Unsurprisingly, my game piqued virtually no interest. The worst part is it wasn't until this morning that I realised I could have at least put my laptop out since I had it with me (so I could grab logs right away if there was a crash). Then rather than looking like a guy with his phone out a lot, I would have been a guy with a laptop, probably showing something.
The rest of the week has been spent mostly on UI stuff with a little bit of gameplay, ads and helping someone at google maybe fix a serious issue. The gameplay UI has been reshuffled and streamlined a bit. The biggest change was replacing an icon with a particle effect so you can see when the machine is washing. As an aside, I rarely use particle effects, and actually had no support in my engine for them before this. Why? Well most of them time they kind of look terrible so I hadn't yet had a good use for them. It is actually kind of curious to me how much emphasis I have seen on them before; they aren't really that elaborate a technical feat. They are nifty though when done right I guess.
I have also completely redone the game over & unlocked screens to be simpler. Thus far this has had mixed results though. I think the issue is a lack of transitions currently.
As part of that I also setup and worked out the kinks with ads, which was one of the ways I have been considering for monetising the game. Still needs a bit of twiddling with numbers but it works.
Oh ya and audio. The first batch of audio. I am putting it way down here intentionally to highlight how I treat audio which differs drastically from how I describe audio (I think it should be early and thoughtful. but too often do it way to late on my projects...)
This week should see the overhaul of the metagame UI, a few test of some gameplay changes and maybe something resembling a tutorial.