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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.

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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.

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