Hello everyone!
My latest update is mostly graphical updates. Here’s a gif with a few changes in action!
What do you think?
OVERVIEW
Until creating this game, I never dabbled in UI art & design. I was surprised by how much I enjoy it!
As a gamer, I always had strong opinions about UI and prefer when the UI fits into the theme of the game (in the game world).
Examples of UI I like include: Chapter selection in Valkyria Chronicles and the UI from Sorcery!
UPDATES
Event UI
UI Art & Design
(The below image doesn't include the newer font.)
If you’re interested in how I designed the event UI (popups), I recommend checking out my Facebook post, which has a few references images I used:
Font
I tried out a couple fonts and found one I particularly like. It requires more time and polish so it looks nicer and less flat, but I’m happy with the color balance I found. The color on the font face looks striking, against the other colors.
There’s also enough contrast between the outline and font face that it’s readable and stands out from the background. Shadows will improve it even more.
Map UI
I still have plenty more work to do here, but it’s coming along. (The top of the map curls into the rough shape of a hornbill!)
The main path displays, villages darken as the player passes them, icons for different village types display.
Villages also pop in when the player is within a certain distance, so it isn’t always apparent how many villages or which type of villages are in the vicinity.
Here’s a pict of the end goal, hill detour options, and different village types:
Process
I personally enjoy process pictures on other devblogs, so here's how I took my map from an outline, to color blockout, to final:
Different Market Icons
I need to differentiate more visually between Large Markets and Small Markets, but here’s my initial draft of each village type.
A fun note: The Small Market village has a durian fruit on top! - A durian is a potent fruit common in Asia. It isn’t something that Western tourists typically like when they first try it.
Small Medicinal - Large - Small Market
WHAT’S NEXT
I have two major items on my TODO list:
- Finally replace the placeholder store UI with an in-game store. (I’m very excited for this, as it is the last placeholder UI I have left to replace!)
- Rework my game loop. I started to do that this milestone but not enough to test how it changes the game feel. I’ll discuss this in greater detail when I get to this milestone. (I previously allowed players to select detours at any point (hill detours/search for animals or food), and now, they must make this decision before they leave a village.)
As always, thanks for reading!
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Is the photo of the tradition wardrobe from your trip to Indonesia ?
=)
That particular image is from Wikipedia. :) I didn't see the Indonesian part of Borneo when I was there last. The clothing was different on the Indonesian island I visited.