I have had these points on my list for forever. Sliding menu screens, fading windows instead of hard visibility toggling, little popping animations when winning a level. I finally took some time and added them in the v0.0.5 pre-alpha demo update. I first started with the fading animation for windows, and set up a whole base for UI animations with it. This is the result!
The UI animation system worked pretty solid actually! While making further animations for popping stuff, I found some improvement points and expanded the animation system even more. Some popping success GUI elements:
Eventually I took on the beast of sliding complete menus, which actually almost felt like a breeze to make because of the now perfected animation system. Some sliding menus:
I'm noticing game is becoming more and more mature now that a lot of bigger bugs have been taken care of, and I'm polishing stuff left and right. The planning board is slowly showing bigger features more prominently while the flood of important bugs and improvements are done. I'm kind of intimidated by some features, knowing that they will take a lot of time and effort to round up and deliver. I want to keep updating the game regularly and am afraid these bigger tasks will slow down my updating spree. Still, I should also not push myself too hard. All in all this is (supposed to be) a thing I'm doing on the side, even though I've had tons of extra time in this COVID-19 chaos. One side of me tries to do work on the game as much as possible now that I have the time, while the other side of me tries to slow things down to avoid a dip when ACTUAL work starts again. Besides all these thoughts, I'm really thankful for the Discord community. They really help with development and seem to be having a good time. I honestly think they would not mind me slowing down when life picks up again. Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!