So after stripping out some extra abilities and monsters, I have six monsters and six abilities. Now I need some levels! I have the randomly generated “sandbox” levels but I figure some tutorial levels would be good since the mechanics are non-trivial.

Each tutorial only has a few monsters and/or abilities to avoid user overload. I’m going with the “explain everything as if you were talking to a 5-year-old” method. Players can always just skip the tutorial levels and each level only takes about 30 seconds anyways so even if some players find it too easy they can quickly go on to harder levels.

One problem I had was with transparency of the icons; this wasn’t obvious when monster icons were placed on the bright buttons, but viewed over the dark help window they showed some obvious fringing…

Can’t see it? Let me zoom that in for you

Yeah, that’s not good. It turns out my original drawing in Inkscape had the background set to transparent white instead of transparent black. Switching to transparent black helps a lot here:

The real fix to this problem is to use  premultiplied alpha but I wasn’t about to start fiddling with that right now. In any case the background should be transparent black anyways since it is easier to work with in other contexts.