Last week we had to present our game however we had a problem with the connection to the server that never happened before! The good thing about this is the fact that now the programmers of our team (Wade, Gerald and Harley) created a server that works offline.
All textures that I create I count with nice personalized Photoshop brushes to help me to shape the texture in the way I want because draw this by using the pencil tool is not my thing. This is the ray roof that I created last week:
Another thing was the creation of a UV map for Mackenzie's mushroom creation:
I came from a designer background however I never designed anything for games until this semester. Every time I create some new texture I post on our closed group on Facebook and I receive feedback from the other members of the group. Most of the time they like the options that I post or sometimes I have to change or redo the whole texture again. This process of posting on Facebook is working pretty good and Mackenzie also posts her work in there and we can comment.
We have total freedom of speech in the group. Everybody is very receptive to criticism and the communication between us works pretty well.
Today in the Desk critique session was more about the visual part appeal that is missing in our game. I believe that the most important thing in a game is to make it fun and functional and our team was pretty focused on that. Now we're in the process of "beautify" the Archmage. When the teacher asked my opinion about "what is missing in the game" I could only agree with the shading part that is missing. By agreeing with them it doesn't mean that I don't have opinion about it because I think the game is in development process and make all spells, actions and interactions to work and also make it fun to play are the most important things. Every step is being taken and everybody in the group is working hard. I'm personally very tired. The last two weeks for me are being the busiest ones because the other units require a lot of my time also. I used to play League of Legends everyday and in this two weeks I couldn't play at all because in the end of the day all I want is to sleep! =/ Maybe that's why I couldn't "think outside the box" this morning and come up with a better answer. Anyway, this is not a diary, let me show you some GUI elements I'm working on and I'm very excited with it!
Of course this is not the final version. I'm thinking about using stones and old metal style (or wooden style instead) in the frame of each element. Here is the first idea I had for the health (green) and mana (blue) bars:
Reflecting with Wade about the idea of having a hand holding a sword and inside of the hand have the avatar of the character we figured out that this is totally out of context for our game. Why? Because mages doesn't use swords =)
Sometimes I have this ideas that I think is pretty cool but is not really appropriate like for example, I had the idea of putting the experience bar in the top of a mage hat, more experience, more the hat is filled with the green content, like that:
The idea sounded good at the beginning but than we realized that the experience bar is not something that needs too much attention for the player and this type of display takes too much space in the screen, so then I'll create a simple horizontal bar instead.
This is the GUI concept from our game:
I started by changing the health and mana bars:
Wade implemented this bar on the game:
but he said that is not fitting with the rest of the game so I'll create another one.
Changing the subject, I had one cool idea to make the game even more fun and I talked to Wade about it and he seemed to like it. To give some feeling of reward to the person who's caring the biggest number of orbs, a kind of glowing crown should appear above the character. Also a sound will come out and say "- You are the mage king!". If somebody else achieve a higher number of orbs a sound will come saying "-New king's empire!", something like that. This will encourage the player to collect even more orbs. Each team will have one king because the enemy king will be the most hunted mage in the game. The person who became a king will have goose bumps to know that he's the main target so he'll have to be careful and count with the help of his team to go back to base, put the orbs in the right place and win the game! This will encourage the use of the spells on him because their team will want to protect him resulting in teamwork. =]
