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JBB: An Artblog!
art blog(derogatory)
titsay
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blake kathryn
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Jules of Nature
h
Misplaced Lens Cap
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Monterey Bay Aquarium
#extradirty
Cosmic Funnies
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Cosimo Galluzzi
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Love Begins
JVL
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@studio-rendezvous-blog
Break Time!
Hello everyone, Ian and I have decided to put the project on hold. We’ve been working hard over the past 6 months together on various projects and need to take the time to recoup and raise some more finances. We’re still very excited to see where this project will take us and can’t thank you enough for your support on the project so far. See you again soon.
Studio Rendezvous Makes Games (SRMG) - 05
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVS84IVpcCM)
Different format, a bit more ranty but here is Update #4!
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EleYQyaycAA) Third Update!
Some of our game pieces :)
UIUXUIUX
With the gameplay systems starting to take shape, its a good time to jump into some more UI UX design.
Tabletop Aesthetic & Immersive Metaphor
We really liked the idea of having the player looking across the map of their lands, with pieces representing quests and heroes strewn across it. The motif of “the game is a physical thing happening on a table” is quite a familiar one for most people, but this can be extended to other types of UIs that are designed to create “immersion” (yes, i said it). For example, stamping documents in Papers Please, or designing circuits in SHENZHEN I/O.
Poupulous was another inspiration that came to mind this week.
This type of pseudo-skeuomorphism is valuable for games for a number of reasons:
It’s another way to tell your narrative.
It leads to novel interactions that form part of the game’s identity.
It can borrow from existing metaphors to help make the game more understandable.
Its a framework that can help unify game concepts.
UI Prototyping
Anyway, as a starting point we drew up a few different “pieces” - a tavern, a tower, a cave etc. We spent quite a bit of time polishing these up, but the idea is that they would be reusable for the future. We placed the pieces together, forming the basic map that we could prototype on.
Having a polished base to sketch on helped a lot imo, it helped the UI elements stand out as we did our planning. Still early days though, but hopefully this would be helpful for the coming weeks.
Support Missions
After some gameplay discussions, Ian and I decided on what the first iteration of core mechanics should feel like and what the interactions should be.
We decided to have a core hero missions that would be difficult to complete and have low rewards on its own, but by managing your other resources to control or capture support missions the player will make the core mission easier to complete.
The goal here being that the player will focus their decision making around the heroes they are more attached to as they will never have enough resources to cover every support mission on the map. We hypothesise that this will make the player's decisions more meaningful as the strategy will be focused on efficiency for the most loved hero.
Initial Item Management
I set up the initial item management system in which the player is able to view and equip the hero’s items. There’s still a long way to go with this system and I’ll be revisiting it soon.
Second update!
Our Furst 3D Vis
With some very basic concepts churning around, we had enough sketches to do 3D mockup of it could look in engine. Here is a turntable:
Off the bat, one of the issues encountered was the roundness of the characters. The sketches didn’t really communicate the dimensional of the characters - and translating the body into round, geometric shapes leads to a lot of funny proportions when viewed side on. Squashing the body seems to work okay, but would be nice to put more aesthetic thought into it later on.
Most of the scene and characters were made from simple primitives. Instead of textures, the detail comes the layers of different meshes (eg. leaves on bushes). This aesthetic fits well with block toy direction we were heading in.
It also seems quite readable, which it important if you will be encountering and identifying randomly generated characters. A mesh-centric approach lets us kitbash our assets as well, which it helpful when your team is only 2 people ;)
Mission UI and Time System
I was working on showing a UI window for a selected mission node as well as built a Time System so that heroes can be assigned to missions and become inactive until their time on the mission runs out.
Ian also whipped up a quick terrain so that it was easier to view the scrolling, the final terrain should be much more zoomed out than this one.
World to Canvas Interaction
Next was working on the interactions, I made it so that you could click on a mission in world space and a UI window would pop up, in the correct location in canvas space.
Drawing some more of our “heroes”. Trying to inject some more personality and variety. Colour coming soon!
Unity Multi-interaction Raycasting through UI Canvas
Was working on navigation around a space whilst also being able to click on objects in that space as shown in the gif.
I was using the new Unity UI Canvas and the EventSystems library’s drag and click functions to do so. The problem I had was the UI Canvas was blocking any raycasts to my 3d objects, however, I couldn’t just remove the collisions with the UI layer as I still needed it to trigger my drag events.
I ended up solving the problem by adding a Physics.Raycast event whenever the mouse clicks AND I wasn’t dragging. I then had to add a layer mask to allow the Raycast to go through the UI layers. The best way I found to do this was to add a public LayerMask, from there you can easily select your layers in the inspector that you want to block or not. This method was preferable as assigning the layers in code proved to be difficult to read, and may cause future problems.
Working on assigning heroes to missions!
uhoh
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHg99hwQGY) Definitely, the most useful GDC talk on game design I’ve watched so far. Breaks down 20 game design concepts into bite-sized pieces.