Design Dev-Log #8 - We've got a new UI!

I'm really overwhelmed by that blog post from Bryce. Let me try and compose myself here. Top quality stuff, right? Anyways, I'll elaborate here since he and I have both been working on the UI the past week, him on the engineering side and myself from the design aspect.

So last Thursday, I was taking a loot at our UI and couldn't help but feel that something was off. We were dealing with scaling issues, which prompted me to take a closer look at in the first place. What I noticed, while looking at the UI, was the it didn't match our updated art style. For starters, the skybox was completely different, and the menus didn't show off any of the phenomenal artwork. I believe that a good menu sets the pace for a good game and if we can show off how beautiful we're making our game, we'll gain more players. So I sat down with the rest of the team and we took a look at the main level, figuring out how we could show it off in the menus, and then it hit me. Why not transform our main scene into one huge menu zone as well? We have the menus in different sections of the level, and the camera flies to the selected menu. After a quick chat with Bryce about how to make it work, and the okay from the rest of the team, I got to work designing it.

Essentially, the menus were already built. We've been using the Unity 4.6 UI tools to build our menus, so a lot of the work was copy paste from the old scenes, into the new one. However, we previously had the menus locked to the camera, so now I had to unlock them from the camera, which inadvertently solved our scaling issues! Now, since we had an entire scene to work with, I started messing with placements of objects to make the buttons feel natural.

As seen in the picture, the vines surround the buttons and make it look like they are "portals" to the new zone. We also have the characters dancing on top of flowers, for the character select. This has helped our menu to feel more organic and less forced, while clearly showing off the cool new art approach. 

I'm going to be honest, I have no idea what Bryce did with the engineering side of the menu. I sat by him today, as he worked on finishing it up while I did other things, and every once in a while I'd glance over and see something working, such as the camera panning, and get real excited. About twenty minutes before we planned on presenting, Bryce tapped me on the shoulder and said "It's done." Sure enough, he was right. Everything panned and worked, looking very cool and showing off our art style. We've already gotten some very positive feedback on it and I'm pretty sure I speak for everyone when I say that we made a good decision in switching to this. Check for a video of it in action on our Twitter channel, or go download the latest build and test it out for yourself. 

Programmer Blog

I've been told I need to start doing this. Up to this point I have done all programming aspects of the game.

This week I worked on the new menu UI.

Design Dev-Log #7

Hey guys! We've got some great new design changes that I'm thrilled to be sharing with you. So as I mentioned in my last post, we got some new models from Alice and I started playing around with them. After adding in a couple of colored lights, I decided to go ahead and change the level to night time. It was mostly as a joke, and to just make the plant lights pop, but after making the change, I found myself really liking what I was looking at. With a purple hue, everything looked a lot more mystical and a lot less Chicago, which is what we've been trying to get to. With that direction in mind, the new models we've been getting into the game now reflect a more mystical look. Currently we've added in vines with blue lights at the top, acting as street lamps, and have plans for other vegetation to mimic human creations.

This first change also prompted me to give the course a complete overhaul, and approach how we've been handling course design. Instead of a complete string, I decided to break the course into segments, and let wind currents carry the Players from segment to segment. I've also been using the nature models as obstacles, which is being well received and leading to people playing the game longer and having more fun. We're now currently testing different plane speeds for the different characters, to give the players some more drastic options when choosing different characters. It's getting pretty exciting, with only a couple of months to go.

#ProjectSky V.0.5 Build notes

Project Sky Version 0.5. 

What's new!

We've changed the level to nighttime in order to help amplify the mystical environment that we are going for. The lighting scheme may change again, but the initial feedback for this change has been very positive. The different characters now have different flight speeds, to cater to different play styles. Try all the new characters and see the different speed changes. We've updated the course as well, to keep in line with the addition of the new level. 

- Updated Lighting Scheme

- New Models 

- New Course/Wind Currents

- Different Plane Speeds

Known Bugs/Issues

- Glitches/Z Fighting

Controls

Left Analogue Stick - Move character

Right Trigger - Boost

B Button - Break

X Button - Checkpoint Reset

Start - Reset Level

Select - Exit Game

Art/Design #2 - Spring Break/1st Week Wrap Up

So many things have happen over the past few weeks. So many that I haven't had time to even put them up here.  On the art side some new, more organic buildings have been made.  They have more emphasis on curves to help with our new nature taking over the city feel. They can be seen below and Nick has already implemented them in the level.

Over in the level design side of things, our main level is now fully painted. (So no more snow.  Winter has come and gone!).

Exciting new stuff!

So there's some pretty exciting stuff going on in the scene today. I'm working to implement the new models that I'm now getting from both Alice and Ashley. Let me tell you, it's like Christmas to have two amazing artists both working on models and getting stuff in at the speed of light. In fact, one of the models that we recently got was a bell flower. We decided to ramp up its size, put some lights on it, and suddenly the idea of having a night scene has taken hold. I'm now in the middle of some lighting tests, but then I'm going to be posting some pictures for everybody to see. It's pretty exciting!

EDIT:

Here's a picture with the flowers being tested within a night scene