Sew's Art Blog

As Hawk mentions over in blog purgatory, I’ve spent the majority of the week revamping and mulling over what to do about the battle GUI. Let’s just talk about it a bit for a second.

click for dat 1080

I’ve added stars in front of the monster names to indicate how many types of attacks they are using. Realistically, this will change soon to be more specific. Instead of 3-stars, it will be “Rock Paper and Scissors”, or just “Rock & Paper” etc. This is one of those things that we debated a bit, but for approachability reasons it’s probably best to just lay it out on the table from the get-go.

In the attack dialogue we have a few too many colors going on here. I’m all for lovely colors spewing from an interface, but the RBG on the attack names might have taken us a step over. I’m hoping that when I add proper icons to the attack names they won’t won’t read as too busy either, or I might be forced into cutting the “Abilities, Items, & Equipment” icons from the start of the list.

Of course the real attraction here is the turn-order list. Players names, a quick stat bar for their HP/MP, and then a list of all their status effects below them. Status effects in a square are actually permanent passive effects caused by class/item/ability/whatever, and effects in circles are actual status effects that will only last so long, like fire or poison. This seems nice at the moment, but when I draw the actual icons for these things it might be harder to keep them in a circle or a box and still be somewhat readable. This is my only current real concern with this layout. I may have to increase the size of each player box by a tiny amount.

To the left of the turn-order boxes are the sword icons that say “This player (color) is attacking this monster!”, and a tool-tip will tell you what they are attacking with. Alternately, a colored potion icon would appear beside a player who is healing someone. To the right of the box is an idea I think we already scrapped, a “has finished their turn” green check mark. This is likely scrapped for just snapping finished players boxes flush to the right side of the screen.

The timer has been moved to the bottom of the turn-order list, which I’m not wild about but am apparently alone in that, so I won’t argue much. Below that I added an ESCAPE icon which might need more attention called to itself, but we’ll see. Easy edits.

I need to mull over this for a few more days while I work on some more animation stuff, and then once I’m more confident in it I’ll create the proper asset set and send it to what’s his name.

Just more of this.. hm hm

This two from last night scrapped for the following idea?

Was working on battle dialogue but.. simplifying it require that discussion about Light Heavy and Trick to happen for a final time. <3

A few things. I’m almost back in a full 100% of the time swing of game-workin’. Today was my last day of ‘dealing with other things’ for awhile. Sorry for being so inactive and having nothing super exciting to show for a bit!

Having said that, it might have been for the best. The game is starting to come together a lot better now, and I have a much stronger sense of what it is and what it needs to be. I’ve seen things in action and motion and I’m getting a much stronger feel for what is working visually and what isn’t.

So the most recent thing we talked about visually was the battle gui. Currently it looks like this, with the player GUI and the monster targeting/attack dialogue respectively.

So this is.. kind of okay. The idea was to have the each player’s individual gui displayed on top of them (or at least near them). This is fine in theory, but it feels like work in a full fight of 4 players v 4 monsters. Your eyes are constantly darting. It is not my intention to pick on anyone else, but Hawk linked to an image of this kind of thing going overboard, and how it is kind of a slipper slope if we start adding on a bunch of status effects and timers and what not. Should this be a real concern of ours? I’m leaning towards yes, as instant readability is what I want most across this entire project. So how do we fix this?

We could approach it in a similar fashion to how we do our map GUI, which is to display players information along the bottom and top of the screen. We’d want it more compact because we don’t need to display as much information. There are a few differences. For one, on the map your character sheet is always on the leftmost side. You wouldn’t want this to be the case in a fight, you’d want it to be displayed in the order in which the heroes are lined up. (You could keep your own card always leftmost still, but you’d want to rearranged the heroes in fight to correlate to that and it just seems like a weird hassle, especially when trying to talk to another player about a fight, though I may be over-thinking this).

I left a big gap on the bottom that doesn’t really need to be there. My thought was to put attacks and abilities there but there are too many and we’d just run out of room. Ideally I could just compress this shape down further into something more manageable. However, I’m wondering if it is necessary to re-do the enemy GUI. It’s possible that leaving the hearts and timer above them isn’t an issue, though.. I could again be mistaken. This requires more mock-ups and discussion!

I’d also like to talk about the map GUI since we’re here..

I have issues with the current map character sheets as well, but it’s entirely a readability issue. (My kingdom for a way to skew and adjust things in real time). I think a lot of it might be the lack of a stroke around the text, and a few things displaying too small at a full resolution. There is no attention drawn to it in a positive way. It needs to not be loud and over-stress the screen, but it does need to quickly call attention to the important information, which it isn’t properly doing right now..

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.