Available here
[Just as a side note, we mentioned before that we were aiming for the end of this month for 2.0. We'll need to delay it for about 3 weeks to give us more time to finish it off, so apologies from all of us on letting it slip!]
Hello all
How are you? Enjoying the longer days? The brighter sunshine? The warmer weather? I’m not, I’m still stuck inside. It has been a while since my last blog up and it has been a roller coaster of development for myself. The last few weeks I have jumped from concepting character arms, UI creation, UI animation to the UI Bootup. The last week of development has been focused on UI. There is so much work that goes into the UI and I have learned so much, however, there is a ton more to learn.
The last time I left you all was here with the gray icons. Obviously we could not leave them like this:
I went through a few variations, these were some of the rejected ones:
Screen tests done with the variations:
Here is the current colour version, not much has changed, going through subtle variations; we decided to keep it simple:
A week later, we hit another snag (along with transparency issues that we had). The subtool menu was not going to work in its initial form. The original idea involved using the shapes of the functions for the canvas…… As previously mentioned on the Judgment Day UI/UX blog post. I initially wanted to avoid creating more icons for the functions in the subtool menu it would've entailed a large job:
Here are the test versions of subtool functions with some variations in the look of the them.
So after the testing, I inevitably knew the change had to be done and at first I resisted! But ultimately I agreed with the rest of the team that the function icons in the current state would confuse the player and would be a mess. We had to make unique icons for each of the functions… and there is a lot of icons! So I went off to a corner to cry.
After crying, I got away from the PC and doodled out some icon designs. At the same time, I researched how other designers approached doing their icon designs. I did this for inspiration and to help designing some of the icons. Also, I did pester Gaz too for some of them. See the snazzy doodles below:
After the doodles, the initial batch of subtool icons were created and these are the ones currently being used. Some of the icons that were created include Colliding Object, Main Object, Apply Force & Translate Object.
The new icons received positive feedback from the team and I wholeheartedly agreed it was an improvement and again went through a process of iteration and I thought I would share some examples:
The next step with the subtool icons was further research and to doodle them out, and took a couple of weeks of work... However, all in all, I am satisfied with the progress of the UI. It has still has a way to go, nevertheless, but we will get there.
So, this me, signing... off... See you ne..!? Oh wait! I got more to write..... I forgot about Animation the Icons and UI.
The last couple of weeks I have also worked on animating the Icons and UI (I say trying, because, I have got back on the animation bike and got a little rusty). Here is a couple of GIF images for the Glitch animations:
Do bare with me over the next few weeks, as these will not be the final animations for the game, as they will be worked upon and improved (well they better improve!).
One of the things that we planned and worked on was a boot up sequence for the Tool's UI. I spent a little time on this, but it still needs some more work. I've learned that whilst creating these new glitch effects for the UI boot up sequence, that we should use them on the next iterations of the glitches that I make for the UI.
I have not forgotten about the Character Arms concept art, I will have to show that another time. Time has run out and I've got to get back to work. Seriously, this blog has taken too much of my time, I blame myself for that.
Anyways got to go.
Tata
Mus