It Just Keeps Getting Better

Let me clarify: "it" (the game) keeps getting better because our team is putting an obnoxious amount of hours into making it better. Between the four of us, we've put in over 500 hours.

This past week has been so exciting. I know I say this every week, but this week was especially awesome because we got to see the characters come to life, thanks to Chris -- our wonderful animator. Then when we got those into the networked game and were all playing together, watching our animated characters running around...

It was just amazing. 

Personally, I've been working on several iterations of UI, the environmental assets I posted before, and the new environment Chris and I are working on together. 

As I predicted, the UI did give me some trouble. I find that UI is just one of those things that you need to make a lot of different versions on so you can pick the best later. There are endless possibilities for UI, so if you only do one version, you're not doing yourself a favour. You have to consider everything from the design, to the placement on the screen and the scale on the screen. You don't want to UI to block the wrong areas, or too much of the player's view.

I used Adobe Illustrator to make most of the UI elements. Illustrator is a vector-based art program, as opposed to Photoshop which mimics painting. It's not easy to explain what exactly vector graphics are. Here's a Wikipedia article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics (I expect teachers everywhere just sighed in disappointment.)

The main advantage to using vector graphics: they can scale up or down without stretching and losing colour information. If you try to scale a regular image up, it just doesn't work; it gets all fuzzy and blurry and loses resolution. But you can scale vector graphics up or down as you please without losing resolution. 

I also just find it easier to make simple shapes and buttons.

Because I used Illustrator, the UI fell into a more cartoony style. That ended up not being a problem, because we were going for that whimsical, simple style for the game as a whole.

For UI in general, I really try to stick by that old saying "Less is more." The less UI there is, the less of the player's screen you have to take up. I also appreciate UI's that don't need an explanation -- either through text or tutorial. I mean, I want the UI to be intuitive and understandable without having to explain anything to the player. 

For example: in many fantasy games health and mana are represented by red and blue bars/meters/counters. It's just become chiseled into gamers' brains that red=health and blue=mana, so any UI that incorporates them is automatically easy to understand (I'm sure there are exceptions of course).

For Chris's prototype, he made the health and mana bars green and purple. I thought this was an interesting change of pace, especially since our element system went along with it -- green being earth (often associated with life) and purple being arcane. So I played around with it, but the health and mana meters just became that much unrecognizable. I ended up going back to the standard of red and blue.

This is one example UI. Taking inspiration from actual sports games for the top left UI, it includes what half the game is in, how much time in the half is left, and the scores of both teams. For a more fantasy feel, I tacked on a gargoyle dragon. 

Then the bottom right UI -- taking inspiration from Team Fortress 2 -- would cover health and mana points with a picture of your character. The health and mana meters are contained within little potion pots.

This UI would be an all-in-one. The two red and blue orbs are the player's health and mana. The numbers on the orange and blue flags are the scores of each team. 

The problem with this one, though, is that it is confusing. When I showed it to Alex he said he didn't understand why the health was on the Ice's flag and the mana was on Fire's flag. 

So I took just the score aspect of that UI and put it on top on the screen with the time left in the half under it. This is less confusing. If we were to use this one, it would be coupled with the bottom right UI of the first picture (the one with the potion pots). 

Moving on: Chris sculpted an extremely basic version of Team Fire's home field so I could get to working on it. It ended up taking forever to get done what I wanted to (which were cliffs to go in the level). But we now how have the base of where we want to go for the end of the semester.

Also, I've been holding out on you. I've been holding back the biggest news of all: we passed Stage 2 on Tuesday! This is a big deal! We weren't even planning on passing, we just wanted to get feedback so we could challenge and pass next week. But we ended up passing which is a huge relief and also very exciting for all of us. This gives us a lot of time for polishing and getting documentation done for our Senior presentation next month. 

I'm not sure I explained any of that so I will try to sum it up quick.

Documentation: All game majors are required to write documents about each specific aspect of the game. Programmers write Technical Risk Documents, which outline all risks on their side of what may be problems in the future. 

Designers, to help the programmers, write a Systems Analysis Document, which outlines all things that the programmers eventually have to program into the game. Designers also write the general Design Document, which explains every single thing about the game. 

Us artists have to deal with Art Bibles, which is a full explanation of the specific style we're going for. We have to break down every element of the game and provide verbal explanations and pictures so that any new artists that come on the team would be able to understand and replicate my art immediately after reading the document.

Senior Presentation: The senior presentation is taking place before Thanksgiving break this year. It's when each team that qualifies (has at least passed Stage 3) gets to present their game to a committee made up of game faculty. We get fifteen minutes -- some of which is talking about the game, and most of which should be a demo of the game. Then afterwards the professors get together and decide which teams/games are going forward to next semester.

Whoo. We've got -- what? -- three weeks to go until then? Where did the time go?

Also, this upcoming Tuesday is our draft version of the Senior Presentation, in front of another section of Senior Capstone. The goal is to get feedback so we can do better at the actual Senior Presentation. It's not graded but still, it's very nerve-wracking. 

Thanks for reading! Wish us luck in the upcoming weeks. There's a lot to do.