Devlog 5 - User Interface / Polish

Devlog 5 – User Interface / Polish

Hi all,

Thank you all for your feedback from the testing session, gave me solid insight on what I need to focus on for the week ahead.

The first change I have implemented based upon feedback is in brightening the axe graphic, since it previously had almost the exact same colour as the background, and would be quite difficult to see.

I’ll definitely keep those issues in mind from now on. It also looks much better in general, which is a bonus. Note the jaggedness on the new one was present in the game with the old one as well, and is dealt with on unity's end

More on the topic of polish, over the course of development, far too much time has been spent in the pursuit of it. Although I will replace most of the artwork eventually, I am out of time to do a rework prior to the due date as originally planned.

The first major rework was in the player character, reflecting a complete redirection of the art style.

Originally, I planned to use the standard indie pixel art, with some fancy normal mapping added at the end, but my initial use of vector artwork for placeholder assets revealed that vector artwork would allow me a much higher end quality for less work than pixel art, as well as being easy to edit and having the ability to be imported into CAD programs with ease to make normal maps for them.

My end goal for the artwork is to have everything created as 3D models from which I can get super-accurate normal maps, I can then import the vector lines into Illustrator to create the diffuse maps, and the end result is 2D sprites that look like 3D objects. This won’t be in the assessment build however, since everything else takes priority.

The best aspect of vector over raster artwork is the ability to simply keep adding detail to objects indefinitely, and adjust those details at will. Behold the incredibly over the top example below:

Because of this, I can make the overall quality level and art style of the entire game quite uniform. If a certain object is noticeably less detailed than another, I can simply add more detail. Pixel art meanwhile would require extensive and well-planned use of layers or else a lot of redrawing would need to be done.

One bit of polish I have implemented just this week however is in adding a noise normal map to the walls’ textures. Previously, it was only used on the floor texture, but I figured it would be an easy added detail.

Another bit of polish I managed to get was in the wall torches, particularly the particle system.

While I could have opted for some simple sprite animation, I instead went with a particle-based flame. The torches emit soft circular particles, which use additive colour blending, meaning the more particles in an area, the brighter it gets, giving the flame that bright central glow. This creates a very nice torch effect.

In terms of user interface, that is on its way soon. I plan to have specific icons for the weapons, showing which slot they are equipped in and the key to press to equip it. The health bar I have currently is temporary, and I plan to have something much nicer within the coming week.

That’s all for now, thanks again