Hello IndieDB!
It's time for the weekly update on Black Market! We have some cool things to show and will talk a little bit about our User Interface and grenades. As always, let us know what you think in the comments below. We greatly appreciate your feedback!
So, here we go! We are done with the second iteration of the ingame interface. It was very important to us to communicate information in a clear and yet interesting way that still fits our design pattern.
In the bottom of the screen you see the experience bar. We put the radar (acting as a simplified minimap) in the top left corner, together with a score counter (we'll talk about it later).We've also got a chat, which is not visible in this picture.
What you do see though is a classic ammunition and health bar in the lower right corner of the screen.
If it comes to match related information you find a match objective counter on the left, and a small scoreboard on the right.
We designed the scoreboard initially to display the top 3 players (and your personal ranking on the server) for FFA modes only, but after countless hours of playtesting and gathering feedback we decided to use it in other game modes as well.
There're still some UI features we haven't shown yet, but we're planning on showing them to you in an upcoming update, as we're currently polishing them.
However, we'd like to draw your attention back to the kill counter. It fuels our ''meta-grenade'' mechanic. The meta-grenade will be handed out empty, but special effects can be unlocked!
When it came to designing the grenades we had four major goals:
1. Grenades should be powerful, just like their real counterparts.
2. Grenades shouldn't be spammable and used in a smart way.
3. Grenades should be earned and not given out for free.
4. Unlocking grenades per player performance should break up regular gunplay from time to time.
You have to earn grenades through kills and a high score. They are a lot more powerful than what you might be used to from other FPS and we will put extra time into the design of the (often rather unloved) smoke-grenade, so that it will become a powerful tool for beginners and hard-core players alike.
We will dedicate one of our coming updates entirely to grenades, so stay tuned while we're fine tuning their behaviour and balancing.
That's it for this week. We can't wait to show you more of Black Market in the upcoming updates and are tremendously excited to hear your feedback. We do always listen. Thank you! :)
(3D Artists / Environment , Character / Animator! - Be part of the team!)
Awesome work on the interface. Keep up the great work!
I think I speak for all your 'fans':
- Your game is going to be UNIQUE!!!
- probably will be the more dynamic gameplay for F2P FPS games out there;
- the clear HUD for better look what is happening in the game, but show what we really want to now, without forgeting anything;
- "Grenades should be earned and not given out for free." GREAT thought!
*there is some date for the alpha?? :D
*clean HUD'
Hi HalloweenBR,
thank you for you awesome feedback. We do really enjoy reading through feedback of all kind as it helps us to understand what you guys really want.
To answer your question; I am afraid I cannot give you a specific time frame on when we'll open up the servers for a larger group of people. Though we'll make sure to let you know as soon as we can spread the word! :)
Hi BM_Jan,
THANK YOU for the awesome game!!!
Just some more thoughts:
- Show us some gameplay, maybe a short trailer (30s or 1 minute, i don't know)... [more soon as possible, we wnat it]
- A SITE/Oficial page for you reach more community (there is a huge amount of people out there in the internet that will love such as the indiedb group);
*one advice: we all know that the multiplayers fps suffer with the CHEATs, so, take some time of the development and think about something that will make them 'path' more difficult you can!
*waiting for next weekend...
Looks really really nice guys. Id love to see it perhaps becoming slightly more 3d. At the moment the HUD looks very flat (yet still nice). The grenades idea seems really awesome. Id love to see smoke grenades play out a little like they do in the new insurgency. That would be a really great way to keep them good to use.
Hello Hammer
The post effects will give it more of a heads-up display look, adding slight texture and dimension.
Good to hear. It still looks ******* awesome, but I feel it would look better with a little depth. Can't wait to see more from this game. Do you currently have a build in which you could record small amounts of gameplay from?