Day Six

Day Six of Game Jam...

Today I reworked the UI of the game, giving the phases better names and hopefully making it easier to understand what's going on via the title screen!

Phases

So the phases are now called "Genesis", "Evolution" and "Judgement", which I think gives them a bit more weight. I've also added sub text to explain a bit more about what happens in each phase.

I've also added a current phase indicator to the top, similar to MTG arena's one. This helps ground the player as they play and understand what they are doing.

Cycle of Life

In addtion I've added a "Cycle of Life" triangle, this shows how the organisms interact with each other. This will also be displayed in the top left within the Genesis phase, in case you forget!

Performance

The other big addition today was a fix to performance. I had been manually iterating all the organisms each frame to find out which was closest. This got very slow once there were hundreds of organisms on screen.

I've now put each organism colour in its own layer, and use progressively larger Physics.OverlapSphere() calls on the target layer to work out the closest organism of the colour it wants to eat. This has greatly improved performance, especially on phones.