Nearing the end, and musings on my next project

It's getting to the point now where working on Arrow Game ends up being more polish than adding features. This is good. This is what I want; it means I am not falling victim to feature creep and am instead focused on a presentable release. Quality over quantity echos my sentiments here.

I posted on reddit to see if any artists wished to collaborate with me in producing the sprites. I've had some interest, but no one has got back to me yet. Without an artist on board soon, I may switch over to my next project, and release this one with 'updated' programmer art. I will try to make it look as good as I can, but there will clearly be an upper limit. I don't wish to 'abandon' this project by any means, but without an artist, and within a portfolio type of mindset, I feel moving on soon will be best if I don't get artist support.

In actual game development news, I've been working on a small tutorial message that will pop up when the user first plays the game. It is there simply to explain what the ships do, how to get high scores, etc. See the picture below.

You simply click on the box to switch the message, the contents of which I control via a script, so it will be easy to generalise this if necessary to different tutorials. I've made two other visual changes here; one, I've reduced the saturation in the background nebulas. That came about as advice from reddit user Brosciusko, so thanks for that. The second is I've lowered the opacity on the combo zone and removed the text. Now that I have the tutorial in place to explain it, I think it looks better with the user barely noticing it, yet still being easy enough to see where to shoot.

The news about code is fairly banal; I'm essentially just going through the game resizing various components to make sure everything looks flush at multiple resolutions still. Simple but tedious work, however it's both nearly finished, and is starting to look good, so I'm thankful for that.

There are a couple of things I want to focus on for my next project. As the work I'm doing is not commercial, the focus here is on learning and improving my skillset. Any new skills require practice, so my next project will involve me using features of both unity and c# that I've never - or have rarely - used before.

Two things I would definitely like practice on that I found out from this project, are varying screen resolutions (Essentially keeping in mind the design considerations from multiple angles), and unity's animation system. The latter in particular is quite exciting, as I can see how powerful it could be, so I would like to explore what I can do with that.

Other things I would like to work with - and may or may not - include 3D and AI. AI in particular is a long term interest of mine, so I would like to begin learning new methods within that field. An obvious idea that jumps out to me is something like a hotel simulator. Create various different rooms, which are then managed by cleaners, staff on the front desk, etc. The hotel essentially automanages after you assign staff to particular rooms. The challenge on my end would be to create sufficiently clever - and stable - AI scripts to have the automanaging working correctly. The interest in 3D ought to be obvious; most everything worth playing is in 3D.