GDC Week

We've been preparing for this dreaded week for a while now. The Game Developer's Conference in California stole away a bunch of the senior game devs. When we went into the labs to work this Sunday it was completely empty besides us, which was incredibly creepy considering the lab is usually full on the weekends. 

From our team, we're missing Sibyl, Kyle and Erin. Which means I'm the only official artist this week, and Alex is the only programmer.

I scheduled Sibyl to finish the character by this past weekend so I could use this week to just create a bunch of skins. There were some problems with the bake at first, apparently, so Chris had to fix it while Sibyl was gone. In the meantime, I decided to just finish up the new GUI and menus to have that out of the way and prepare for mass texturing for when my artists returned.

New menu screens! Alex made it so these fade out and switch every 60 seconds.

So it finally came to my attention after about seven months that health GUI is usually on the left side of a player's screen. I nearly headdesked I felt so stupid. I don't know how I didn't notice that before.

I switched the health/mana potion bottles to the left side of the screen. Alex, Chris and I stared at the GUI and debated for a while what the "background" of the potion bottle GUI should be. You know how it had that mage at the corner of the screen before? We decided to ditch that. There was really no reason to have it, and it was just taking up space. 

Again, I wanted to keep the GUI looking more simple than shiny, busy, or complex. I feel like this is not even something that's an opinion, because I've looked at tons of FPS screenshots for examples or inspiration, and all games have really basic UI. I mean it's usually white and another colour, and simple icons and numbers. This isn't something that needs to be complicated. It just needs to get the point across.

Although I realize the concern with just going with simple, I guess. We don't want the UI to look boring or nondescript. I don't want it to seem like I just went into Illustrator and made circles as a last-minute throw-away task either. The fact of the matter is, GUI is just usually not that complicated. And it doesn't need to be. 

Anyway, after Chris finished the character I got a few skins done. It went a lot quicker than I thought. Thankfully, I was actually smart about this and did it in such a way that the colours are layered. This way I can export from 3D Coat as a .PSD file with the layers in tact and just play with the colours as I please in Photoshop. It makes it a lot easier to make an ice uniform a fire uniform, and just change colour palettes in general. It also makes it possible to just layer the different patterns over a base design, so I don't have to paint everything all over again. Yay!

Our mage is lookin' cute. :)

Also, thank god for Chris Sydell. He's been such a savior. Since we had a new character, we needed new animations. Doing all of the animations all over again was going to be a huge task. I asked if it was possible for the animations to just transfer to the new character, but I got a No. But then Chris managed it and then suddenly we had all of our animations back in one night. PHEW!

I am totally ready for this week to be over. I don't think you understand how stressful it is to be missing all of my 3D artists this week when we only have two weeks to fully complete the game... Wish us luck PLEASE!