Sew's Art Blog

I can’t believe I didn’t blog last week. I seriously thought I had. Well, this is what last weeks blog would have looked like in a single image:

This week I continued to try to expand on this idea, to get the UI as locked in as I can. I arrived at roughly this point before shifting focus.

We began discussing the idea of the quest log and quest markers. Ideally, the quest menu would either be a sub-menu or non-existent. Hawk suggested revising the quest arrows, to make them more informative of what is going on. So an arrow will point to a location that has a quest, that arrow will inform you who that quest is for (global or party), what type of quest it is (battle, event, payment?), if you meet the requirements for that quest, and if it’s part of the Main quest line or not. In addition to that, I was also thinking it would be best of town names were constantly displayed, either over the town or under it. This is putting me in a weird map-clutter position, that if I don’t handle it perfectly the map will be a nightmarish visual mess.

So here is my first pass with some generic icons, some of which I resorted to using text in! Gross.

So instead of indicating global or party, we’ll just indicate ‘Party!’ with the party icon. If the party icon isn’t there, it’s global! It’s also great to reuse the same party icon from the menu instead of trying to find a second way to display the same information. Easy enough! The main quest is a fancy gold that has a pretty shine animation so you can’t miss it. I want to add some kind of color indicator for quest types as well, but need to mull that over a bit more.

I’m also torn on how to show “You meet the requirements to complete this quest”.

Thinking about glows of green and dark red/black to indicate ‘can’ and ‘can’t complete respectively. Or coloring the ring around it green or red (green ring not pictured!). At the bottom I’m using my ring design as a “percentage complete” indicator for quests that require multiple things and you are part way there. So if it required 2 things and you had one, half of the notched would be filled green while the other half would remain dark or red, some different color. Just.. throwing that idea out there.

The final big discussion was about quests that aren’t viewable on your current screen. How do we tell the player there is a quest they are involved with, but just out of the way? First thought was a bad one, of just having edge arrows. We have too much other stuff around the edge to do that. So now I’m leaning more towards arrows in a radius around the player pointing to where the quest is. The arrows will need to be basic, possibly giving no information other than “quest over there”, and maybe as much as “a quest you can complete this way, a quest you can’t complete that way”. They’ll require a slightly different kind of arrows than the ones mocked up here, though. (There is also the unspoken option of not display quest arrows for quests off screen. Though, I might get yelled at for that one)

Been kind of all over the place this week design wise. I’ve been a little disillusioned with the project itself, too. Some days I think the game is great and fun, and some days I just wonder ‘how do we make sense of this mess‘. I think that’s probably a normal feeling for a long project like this one.

However, the last few times we’ve gone to test I just didn’t want to. It felt like a chore, something I didn’t really want to do. I haven’t been really having fun playing the game. Part of it is because I don’t understand easily what is going on with a lot of it. I’m picking a class on my first turn, most of which I don’t really understand what they do. This could be partly a reading comprehension issue, except even the few classes that I understand, I don’t understand them from the class info I get when I have a chance to pick it. We have to improve this information so it feels less like homework or a guessing game to figure out who you want to be. The problem is only amplified when you get to pick your second and third classes once you hit the appropriate levels. It’s difficult to wrap my head around how interesting and useful a Mystic Bruiser Acrobat is going to be, when I can’t fully understand the benefits and drawbacks of each of them. [Classes that alter the stats you get on level up should probably show you a ‘total after you take this class’ to prevent further confusion when picking 2nd and 3rd classes? (Like if one class raises your HP but the other one lowers it by the same amount per level, you can know that easily?)]

This is pretty hefty and maybe not practical, but it’s the kind of information I think people need to know?

I’ve also lately been having a problem of really not knowing where to go or what to do. I know how the game functions, I know I should be completely quests but. I feel like I keep making poor choices (not including death chests >.>) that put me almost infinitely behind. If someone else starts out strong, my only hope is that they meet some great misfortune or I get incredibly lucky. Usually when something bad happens to someone else though, it never seems /that/ bad. Having said that, I haven’t got to finish a full game in awhile, not since the respawn timer was added, and that might help that completely.

I’ve been caught in the ‘pretty boring but important’ part of this for awhile now. Interface design might feel more rewarding when it’s actually in game and I know what’s going on, but all the parts that will make the game charming don’t exist yet, and that’s on me. I haven’t been able to get to enemies, their animations, story backdrops, more backgrounds, eventually making the map not look like a train wreck. You know, the.. artsy stuff. The things that will make everything seem more lively and engaging. When I look at this I think, “Oh, yeah, we totally got this. This is exciting!“. And I’m sure I’ll feel a ton better once we’re back around to doing that. Regardless of my current feelings, be that from my mood or something just being off, I haven’t forgotten that I love this game and I remember what it can and will be once we get it done.

I did it! A month in the making. Whoo.

I say that, but I’ll probably redraw the inventory icon. I have more to say on all this but I’m kind of beat right now.