The moon and the brush circle

A score of kills is just a number. These changes make the number feel like something that is being written.

The circle

A brush circle, an ensō, now rings the kill counter. It is one stroke of ink, revealed clockwise, a tenth of the way around with every kill, starting from the wet head of the stroke and finishing at the dry tail. The tenth kill closes the circle and the speed steps up a level. The next kill starts a fresh circle, a little darker than the last.

It is a progress bar that does not look like one, and it tells you how close the next speed-up is without asking you to read anything.

The moon

The painted backdrop already had a moon, but it sat off to one side of the mountain. I moved it so the moon is centred behind the peak, and anchored the counter and the circle to it. The result is a simple shape you can read at a glance: mountain, moon, circle, number.

One rule governs everything in the picture: the background must never make an enemy harder to see. The area behind the characters is washed toward pale paper, and I measure the contrast between that wash and a dark enemy rather than trusting my eye. Moving the moon darkened that band by about five percent, which my estimate still leaves above the readable range, and I re-measure after any repaint.

Also that day

• Timing rings on the ground. Faint rings show where a strike will land and where a perfect one will. They stay at one constant, low opacity on purpose, because anything that fades in and out changes how you judge the timing.
• A wider perfect window. After watching people play, the perfect window became a share of each enemy's approach time instead of a fixed number of milliseconds, with a floor at the limit of human precision. At the slow starting levels the old fixed window was only a few pixels of travel, which made a perfect strike look like the enemy had already touched Renzy. Proportional, it keeps the same size on screen until the speed makes the floor take over.
• Enemies keep running until the blade lands. The game decides a kill the instant you tap, but Renzy's sword takes a moment to arrive. The enemy now keeps moving for that moment and only falls when the blade reaches him. The game's timing is untouched; only what you see changed.