Here’s a sample screen-shot of this weekends work. I’ve been putting the extra performance I gained at the start of the week into moving most of the HUD sprites into 3D objects surrounding the player’s kart.

After the last round of demoing I did at the local game dev community session I realised my game is so intense that most people didn’t see any of the old HUD or on screen hint messages.

My solution is to move all those elements down around your kart so you don’t have to move your eyes away to see the HUD information, in the screen shot you should see:

• trail of coins you’ve collected (if you’re playing it with the shop enabled).
• You currently armed weapons floating just behind the kart, the circle reticule indicates the item that will be fired (you still cycle and shoot them with the right stick).
• Position indicators above the heads of all the players.
• The speech bubble for control hints and messages (“Yikes, pigs!!!” is telling you the pigs are after you because you’ve just picked up the truffle, that’s the weird blob floating above the players head).

I’ve still got to decide what to do with the heart health indicators, I think I’m almost at the limit of cluttering the screen. Also need to fix up the font on the lap time in the bottom right corner, but that won’t be too hard.

The shop is now completely broken, so that’s the next thing I’ve got to work on, otherwise I’m pretty chuffed with where all this is going!