Wakeskater Studio Indie Game Development: [SBX] What an UPDATE?!?

Personal:
Lately I haven't been motivated to program much, mostly my brain feels like gelatin. But surprisingly enough, after a 12 hour night shift, this morning I felt inspired to do an update to SBX... huh go figure. Delirium brings great things!.. sometimes. Anyway, I am looking forward to May, as I have 2 vacations, one is for the half marathon in Michigan with my darlin' (which, BTW, i wimped out of, I am just going to run the 5k) and the other is for a friends wedding in Philly.

Also one of my good friends is moving to Colorado to live with me for this coming year until I get married! I am very excited. For one, he is one of my closest childhood friends, and also, he is good at tennis and now i have someone to play! (Other than my fiancee who is doing well but still learning).

SBX:
Well it certainly has been a while since I have even contemplated this first completed game of mine, but I did, and I went back and made Easy mode... well... easy! I didn't really have an easy mode, just normal and hard, but I decided to go back and change normal to easy. It was simple enough, I lowered the HP of the enemies in the first half of the game, reduced damage taken by enemies to the player and lowered the score requirements for an A and B in level 1 by QUITE a bit.

The other big update was a new GUI! Yea! I made a much prettier HUD that isn't blocky and boring like the old one, I made a few simple sprites and made something still simple but a little less boring looking (It also takes up much less space).

Well let's take a look at a few screen shots to give you an idea of the new HUD.

OLD

NEW

As you can see in these Level 1 screen shots, the new UI has a better flow and takes up a little bit less room. I really like how it turned out compared to the old ones, it's more colorful and just looks a lit nicer overall with the gradient bars.

Here are 2 more from level 5:

OLD