Week 05

This week had the team solving some Art questions in both character design and User Interface design.

Early in the week, Chris and Tom pointed out that UI should start its iterations earlier rather than later. Hongzhu stepped up to the plate and decided to begin work on our UI system. Since Julian is technically the UI designer (along with any other design roles that need filling) it was crucial for both Hongzhu and Julian to be able to communicate and iterate UI quickly. The first step on this front was to take inventory of all of the UI logos that the team had left us. All of the work was exported as PNG, luckily, so reusing, mixing and matching, and polishing each item should be as easy as we expected. It also helps that most of the UI uses one shade of yellow, so we don’t need to worry much about UI color scheme.

On the character design end, we read through the documentation and saw that the game only takes place about 100 years in the future. This was perfect for Healthy since she could just use human proportions for the survivors. We had this discussion because we were worried that some players would start to question human proportions thousands of years into the future. The next decision was to see how we could convey more emotion through the Survivors, as we were about to embark on a journey of the Survivors being the stars of the game. It was crucial for the player to not only care about the survivors on a gameplay level, but on an emotional level as well. For now, Healthy will sculpt basic facial characteristics like stylized hair and stylized eyes to make each survivor look different, as she does not have the time to model 20 unique characters.

Finally, playtesters conveyed their frustrations with our camera system’s scrolling feature, so an initial fix was to smoothen the camera. But the downside to this was that some faculty members were wondering what extra gameplay these new camera angles can provide. This is now a work in progress gameplay system. As we play tested some more, we wondered if maybe some elements of randomness would add interesting gameplay to the currently sterile build. Players find watching the survivors move around the massive environment, but with no danger, these survivors are just cute little cogs in the machine. Maybe if we found some morbid ways to get rid of a survivor, the player would feel more emotional when they are lost?