I have to stop using so many music references for the titles. But they are an easy way out, and I’m lazy!
Anyway, very briefly, these past weeks we’ve been finishing up the design of most of Okhlos’ HUD and windows. We had to make a lot of hard choices, and we are still changing a lot of things that aren’t closed yet.
(Our previous HUD vs. the new one. Click to enlarge!)
It’s hard, because you have to anticipate how the player will interact with the given information, so you have to guess a lot.
The most significant change was adapting everything to a 1 on 1 pixel aspect. Every element was 2x in the original pixel art work. We decided (actually, I didn’t consult Sebastian and went on with it without telling him until it was finished) to make everything 1x, meaning to respect the pixel art as is.
This is the Items Thing (technical terminology). It’s function is to show you the keys assigned to each item and tell you if anyone in your mob is carrying one of those items.If you don’t have an item, it will be shown in gray. The image you see is here is the one that will be shown if you are using a joystick, we didn’t do the keyboard graphic yet. And as you can see, it’s much prettier if you treat each pixel as a pixel, instead of scaling them.
This is the story of the basic buttons. At first, we used to use the Dalek font (don’t know the relation between a Greek font and Dr. Who) and the sprites at 2x. Later, we switched to a more pixel-friendly font. Finally, last week, we took them to the actual size.
Here you can see the mob count tab, that shows the number of people you have in your mob, how it was and how it currently is.
The “1P” in the first image is a sign of how much more we were focused on multiplayer during the early stages of development. The second attempt added the mob’s rage bar. This bar basically shows how rampageous your mob is, increasing when the mob smashes things or tramples enemies, and decreasing over time. Finally, I made the third option last week, it’s not final yet, but we decided to show a mob icon/graphic, and separate the bar from the mob count.
(click to enlarge!)
This is the pause menu. This may be the most important window of all. Here, you will see all of your units, heroes, and the mob modifiers. If you have a hero that gives you +10% attack bonus, you will see it here. It’s faaar from finished yet but we think that is important to keep it as simple as possible. Too much information will ruin the window completely, it will frustrate the player when navigating it. So we will try a lot of mockups to see how we can best convey all the information.
And keep in mind that things can get a little crowded.
Yeah, that’s too much information. Feel free to feel overwhelmed by clicking the picture and pressing F11 (In chrome and in PC, don’t know in other systems).
As always, we love your comments! You can reach us in Facebook, Twitter or right down here! We try to answer all of them! (Please stop sending us nude pictures)
Well, as John Green says, Don’t forget to be awesome!
Roque
(Yeah, I know, I never sign the posts, I suppose that I’m very hipster lately)
Looks very nice and interresting ;)