Skip to main content

UI experiments and default zoom.

After some feedback about the game in it's current state, it's obvious that the camera was zoomed out too much and the level textures are too high contrast. That's actually something I've talked about before, when talking about how I was going to rework the tile set textures to be lower contrast.

The final tilesets will be quite low contrast and perhaps a little flat and boring, but that was always part of the plan. The background is not supposed to be the star of the show.

Take a look at this, it's one of my favorite Korean traditional paintings.

The background is just background, the figures stand out, except of course for the two guys hiding behind the rocks. :) The artist has used the plain texture of the paper as an element of the painting, not to be covered up, but to be masked and veiled, being here a tree and there a rock and elsewhere the skin of a bathing woman.

I've tried to show a little of how the game would look like with low contrast backgrounds:

Here the characters stand out more, there are just the characters, monsters and shadows. This is all early stuff, the new level textures haven't been made yet, and the props and character models are just temporary. But you can see where it's going maybe.

I've also started working on the UI.
Because of using GLSL textures I can have a base shape of UI elements and then overlay a detailed material texture. Here's some basic shapes with a wood texture:

I'm going to test some different materials and see what looks good as I'm introducing the functions of the UI in to the game. It has to be tested with working UI elements, not just guessing what will look good, but actually trying it out. As with above I think it needs to be lower contrast, there will be text and images on there, so although I'd like to have it look like real wood or leather, functionality trumps all.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous1 December 2014 at 07:40

    Definitely an improvement. I still think it is a pity that the characters are so small, especially when so much time has gone into making them look great

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pickledtezcat3 December 2014 at 08:42

      Thanks! The characters are actually designed to be small, but there will be a zoom function so you can get in a take a closer look if you need to. I think most of the time players are going to want to be zoomed a little way out, because of the four player characters. You'll want to see the nearby area, and keep an eye out for monsters.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

  Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us
3 comments
Read more

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.
6 comments
Read more

Make your game models POP with fake rim lighting.

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho
Post a Comment
Read more