Posts Tagged ‘Concept Sketches’

Of GUI and Men

A few things. I’m almost back in a full 100% of the time swing of game-workin’. Today was my last day of ‘dealing with other things’ for awhile. Sorry for being so inactive and having nothing super exciting to show for a bit!

 

Having said that, it might have been for the best. The game is starting to come together a lot better now, and I have a much stronger sense of what it is and what it needs to be. I’ve seen things in action and motion and I’m getting a much stronger feel for what is working visually and what isn’t.

 

So the most recent thing we talked about visually was the battle gui. Currently it looks like this, with the player GUI and the monster targeting/attack dialogue respectively.

 

 

 

So this is.. kind of okay. The idea was to have the each player’s individual gui displayed on top of them (or at least near them). This is fine in theory, but it feels like work in a full fight of 4 players v 4 monsters. Your eyes are constantly darting. It is not my intention to pick on anyone else, but Hawk linked to an image of this kind of thing going overboard, and how it is kind of a slipper slope if we start adding on a bunch of status effects and timers and what not. Should this be a real concern of ours? I’m leaning towards yes, as instant readability is what I want most across this entire project. So how do we fix this?

 

We could approach it in a similar fashion to how we do our map GUI, which is to display players information along the bottom and top of the screen. We’d want it more compact because we don’t need to display as much information. There are a few differences. For one, on the map your character sheet is always on the leftmost side. You wouldn’t want this to be the case in a fight, you’d want it to be displayed in the order in which the heroes are lined up. (You could keep your own card always leftmost still, but you’d want to rearranged the heroes in fight to correlate to that and it just seems like a weird hassle, especially when trying to talk to another player about a fight, though I may be over-thinking this).

 

 

I left a big gap on the bottom that doesn’t really need to be there. My thought was to put attacks and abilities there but there are too many and we’d just run out of room. Ideally I could just compress this shape down further into something more manageable. However, I’m wondering if it is necessary to re-do the enemy GUI. It’s possible that leaving the hearts and timer above them isn’t an issue, though.. I could again be mistaken. This requires more mock-ups and discussion!

 

I’d also like to talk about the map GUI since we’re here..

 

 

I have issues with the current map character sheets as well, but it’s entirely a readability issue. (My kingdom for a way to skew and adjust things in real time). I think a lot of it might be the lack of a stroke around the text, and a few things displaying too small at a full resolution. There is no attention drawn to it in a positive way. It needs to not be loud and over-stress the screen, but it does need to quickly call attention to the important information, which it isn’t properly doing right now..

 

Tell a Friend

I’ve been gone for a bit, but I’d never desert you. Let’s talk mood and tone.

 

The development cycle of this game has been pretty stupid, in that we have done things in a terrible order. Or rather, I have done things in a terrible order. Hawk tries to blame himself for a lot of this, and that’s fine. He can have all the blame he wants. <3   Ideally, I would have made several usable style mock-ups for this game. In reality, I've made next to none. This is a huge blow to my credibility, I should definitely known better. In that spirit, it's never too late to start, especially since uh. How the game functions keeps shifting in ways that will require me to redo certain things.. functionally. Maybe this is all Hawk’s fault!

 

Okay, let’s tackle this problem like adults and start from the top with a simple question: Do we have anything that is definitely locked-in and can’t be changed because it would be a monumental waste of time? The short answer (dontyellatme) is no, not really, not from a tone perspective anyway. YES, the art for the animation is pretty locked-in and I ain’t redoin’ it. However, recoloring the body pieces or adjusting the way the heads looks if need be is not a big deal. So, with the answer of “no” in place, let’s explore a bit. I don’t think this is a game that can have a super serious art style or tone. We’re all basically agreed on that.

 

 

 

 

 

Surprise!

While my cohorts won’t admit it (at least not to my face (but probably more as a tool to keep me moving)), the way the base animation looked needed some love. Both structure-wise and painting-wise. Since I was faced with the task of basically redoing my Spine project, I figured now was the perfect time to kill some birds.

 

The first step was to adjust my default standing position. The old one was just the first frame of the only animation that existed at the time, but it’s kind of a bitch to work with. A much better idea would be to draw the character standing a little more normally. So let’s do that real quick!

 

 
Balls for hands and feet – The #1 sign of a lazy artist

 

What’s this?! Surprise, women! And surprise, all pieces completely redrawn and proportioned better! Ho-Ho. They are also drawn a lot larger than the old version. Yeah, I know, even my old version was way bigger than we’re putting them in game. I think Hawk said he was resizing the old one by around 80%. Yikes. So why would I take the time and trouble to make full version even larger? It’s just easier to work with, get off my back old man. Here’s the back view, ’cause I’m generous.

 


Butts & Ammo

 

Okay, so now what? After some quick alignment tests in Spine to make sure I drew all the pieces the right sizes to prevent overlapping, it’s time to do some paintin’. Oh boy, my favorite. Oh, and actually drawing the hands and feet. Lazy, lazy.

 

 
Some of the lines on the male chest have been erased and edited ’cause I forgot too before saving this. Also, the female torso is a different size than the male so doesn’t line up perfectly right here. Pretend it does! (’cause it does)

 

Now everything looks good again! Excite! From here, I do a heavy amount of work in Spine. I convert several of the body pieces into meshes to help remove gaps in the animation. I’ve also gone ahead and properly set up the skins in spine, so switching from male to female during any of the animations is as easy as clickin’ a button. After all the meshes are made, it’s time to recreate all the animations again. This is probably the easiest and hardest part of this process.

 

 
boing. This are 50% of sketch size

 

Keep in mind these are nowhere near finished animations. I did this animations super fast just to kind of get a feel that I was on the right track and that my meshes were working properly. The left upper arm still need some tweaking, just a little too bulky at the top and I can’t mesh that away.

 

I have a few things left to do here that I was hoping I’d have enough time to finish before this blog went up, but I guess I don’t. I still have to paint the North set and mesh it, then do the the animations proper again. None of these are the daunting task that I thought redrawing everything was though, so I’m very pleased with the speed and quality I managed to do this at.

 

 

I did in less than a week what took me more than a year to do the first time. I’ll just let that sink in.

 

Playing Catch-Up

I can’t believe I didn’t blog last week. I seriously thought I had. Well, this is what last weeks blog would have looked like in a single image:

 

class2

 

This week I continued to try to expand on this idea, to get the UI as locked in as I can. I arrived at roughly this point before shifting focus.

 

fuller-UI-mockup3

 

We began discussing the idea of the quest log and quest markers. Ideally, the quest menu would either be a sub-menu or non-existent. Hawk suggested revising the quest arrows, to make them more informative of what is going on. So an arrow will point to a location that has a quest, that arrow will inform you who that quest is for (global or party), what type of quest it is (battle, event, payment?), if you meet the requirements for that quest, and if it’s part of the Main quest line or not. In addition to that, I was also thinking it would be best of town names were constantly displayed, either over the town or under it. This is putting me in a weird map-clutter position, that if I don’t handle it perfectly the map will be a nightmarish visual mess.

 

So here is my first pass with some generic icons, some of which I resorted to using text in! Gross.

 

 

So instead of indicating global or party, we’ll just indicate ‘Party!’ with the party icon. If the party icon isn’t there, it’s global! It’s also great to reuse the same party icon from the menu instead of trying to find a second way to display the same information. Easy enough! The main quest is a fancy gold that has a pretty shine animation so you can’t miss it. I want to add some kind of color indicator for quest types as well, but need to mull that over a bit more.

 

I’m also torn on how to show “You meet the requirements to complete this quest”.

 

 

Thinking about glows of green and dark red/black to indicate ‘can’ and ‘can’t complete respectively. Or coloring the ring around it green or red (green ring not pictured!). At the bottom I’m using my ring design as a “percentage complete” indicator for quests that require multiple things and you are part way there. So if it required 2 things and you had one, half of the notched would be filled green while the other half would remain dark or red, some different color. Just.. throwing that idea out there.

 

The final big discussion was about quests that aren’t viewable on your current screen. How do we tell the player there is a quest they are involved with, but just out of the way? First thought was a bad one, of just having edge arrows. We have too much other stuff around the edge to do that. So now I’m leaning more towards arrows in a radius around the player pointing to where the quest is. The arrows will need to be basic, possibly giving no information other than “quest over there”, and maybe as much as “a quest you can complete this way, a quest you can’t complete that way”. They’ll require a slightly different kind of arrows than the ones mocked up here, though. (There is also the unspoken option of not display quest arrows for quests off screen. Though, I might get yelled at for that one)

 

Lazarus of Bethany

I had an epiphany mid-week on how to do these bone animations. It’s hard to explain completely, but the gist of it is that I am used to doing stepped animations, not interpolated animations, and seeing each piece interpolate to the next really messed with my brain and the entire process I had cooked up. So I changed my set-up mode to be stepped, and then interpolated it after the fact. Now that I have complete confidence in my program, my only obstacle is getting the art to look like I want it to in motion.

 

This means a Spine license purchase is a-go! Everyone rejoice as the company takes it’s first hit of investment juice and our first hit to funds to the tune of -100$. Go us! (speaking of which, I’ll be uploading some gifs of the animation when I purchase the license later this week)