The last bit of work that I have for this project - these targeting reticules were designed to indicate when a given target was ready to be destroyed. After some preliminary designs (2, 3, 4), we settled on a form bracketed by slightly adjusted alto clefts (1, 5, 6, 7). Versions 2 and 3 would eventually be reincorporated as parts of the animated cue sequence.
These reticules would be color-matched to the key and corresponding drone (9), and would play through a short animation as the target approached, with the bracketed form being the cue to fire.
As you may have noticed in the earlier posts in this series, the targeting reticule also made it as part of the Metropolisten logo.
Another UI task I picked up - The lettering here is one that I made on the spot. The tilt and uniform widths are intended to evoke eighth notes, and thus the letters were positioned on the staff in such a way as to simulate their placement on a given line of music.
Image 1 is a prototype render of the screen edited over an early screenshot of the game’s environment.
We had focused so much on the in-game elements and models that the team had forgotten to assign User-Interface duties. I wasn’t getting very far with building models of. . . . well, the buildings that were supposed to create our city, so I passed those duties on to the teammate who was most interested in designing them and picked this job up instead.
Once again, the red is mainly meant as a placeholder - the colors on the logo would have either cycled through what was on the player’s keyboard, or responded to which key was being pressed at the time. The draft (1) is the last iteration we got to making, and it is intended to demonstrate where the main elements would be placed. In a finished product, these elements would float in front of the camera while a series of pans from the city itself cycled in the background.
Another element that I was tasked with making was the hand placement indicator (2, 3, 4). We eventually settled on the third iteration because, on top of mirroring the lime green middle C, it also showed which colors the other notes corresponded to. These colors, as I mentioned in the Drones’ post, would match the targeted enemy, and were applied to our controller keyboard using sticky notes and colored pencils - not exactly the most glorious way of doing it, but it worked.
The placeholders (1) being, of course, quite underwhelming, it was time to move on to creating proper target units. This was a decision that the team had come to several weeks in, since we wanted to make it a pacifistic game. However, the grading team kept pushing to make a clearer, easier to identify objective, so we eventually decided to use enemy drones to signify which notes the player would have to hit.
I drew inspiration for the cores of the drones from jet engines and the Mono Eye drone from Elsword. The wings were designed to mirror given note values (3), since at the time we were also playing with the idea of having held note scores. Unfortunately, the Piano-to-Computer interface wasn’t able to handle this in a way that could be accurately moved into Unreal.
One last idea I wanted to work with, but that didn’t make it into the graded cut of the game due to importing complications: I wanted the drones to have either two or four wings, based on their note’s position on the musical bar (4, 5, 6).
For example, middle C is a note that sits on the line in sheet music, and would therefore have only two wings (4). The D above or the B below it, however, sit between the lines, and would therefore have two pairs. (5)
The bright colors on the drones were also intended to match to the key that needed to be pressed to destroy them (more on that later). The red here is a placeholder meant to indicate which parts of the models were intended to be recolored.
Closing in on what would be the final form of the ship for this project, we decided to replace the pipe-organ-esque cylindrical boosters (1, 2) in favor of a more rectangular shape (3), which would therefore mirror the keyboard more faithfully. We also closed the gaps between them, and decided on an 11-key layout for symmetry’s sake (4).
The grading team would confront us with this decision for the rest of the project - on the one hand, we were restricting control of the ship to one octave on the keyboard - eight keys, starting at middle C. However, on the ship, middle C was represented by the key just to the left of center, and the end keys were F and B.
