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

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra...
7 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

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t...
3 comments
Read more