Soul Saga - Dev Diary 42 news

Summary
After receiving a lot of feedback from some friends regarding Soul Saga's menu, I decided to give it a change. Because of the way I had set up the menu before, people couldn't even realize it was a sweet steam-punk fantasy themed phone! I thought hard about how I could compact my current GUI designs so I could shrink the phone so it was much more pleasant on the eyes. I also took into consideration that some menus took less space than others, so using the same phone size for each menu was looking like a lot of wasted screen real-estate.

Character customization was going to be the hardest to tackle, so I started there. After working all day on redesigning the thousand lines of code, purely related to the character customization GUI, I was eventually able to shrink both the code base and the phone down to 50% of their original sizes! This means the phone looks better to you and the code looks cleaner to me. =D

A cool feature is the animated phone size. When changing between different screen in the menu, the phone will adjust to the size of the next menu, so that it's not always sucking up a large chunk of the screen.

Tomorrow
I will finish porting over the main menu and the inventory to the new menu system. I will then add some additional particle effects and skills.

Day 42 (2013/03/11 M)
14.75 hrs. Today ( 404 Total)

• Backend
  • Backed up all of Soul Saga’s code base.
  • Did a lot of code cleaning since the menu system was revamped.
• GUI
  • Completely revamped the current UI interface to be more compact.
    • The previous GUI layout did not allow for players to see Soul Saga’s cool phone!
    • The Phone GUI now animates to a new size, scale, and rotation based on the opening menu. This allows menus that don’t need much space not to take up the whole screen, and menus that need more space can make the phone bigger.
    • The Dressing Room has been reduced down to a single menu.
  • The dressing room no longer allows for changing the player’s character’s gender or name outside of the initial start menu character creation.
• Project Management
  • Reached out to several similar Kickstarter projects that were successful.
  • Interviewed a successful Kickstarter campaigner (Ryan Harmon) who gave me lots of useful advice on the upcoming Kickstarter.
    • His game is Echoes of Eternea Facebook.com.
  • Contacted art team (Robekka) regarding Kickstarter and ordering UI assets.
  • Contacted a vendor regarding prices on goods.
• Testing
  • Got feedback on the game from some friends.