Visual Progress — Screenshot Saturday
So a big advantage of this big UI overhaul is that I have actually visible things to share today!
So there are a couple of things going on here. The entire information section at the top has been shoved over to the right and made more graphical. While the card hands of other players are now visible to give a better sense of what is going on around you.
I've also added some animations to playing the cards and a visual measure of how you're doing.
Fortunes update
I've Been working on using NGUI to update Fortunes.
The main benefit is that it will be able to automatically scale with resolution so we won't get awkward overlapping. But it also has some nice handling of drag scrolling that was frustrating me for the cards in hand.
Next up will be the most challenging part of the GUI update, handling Tarot Divination layouts. I have some thoughts from looking at some tarot apps and the better scroll handling should allow more flexibility in that regard.
What has been the most interesting tarot deck art you've seen? Let us know in the comments.
Withering away
Those poor plants in the upper right are almost gone
Got the plants working in a "creep" like fashion now. They cover a radius around where you planted and slowly draw in instead of just having a static plant that vanished after a time. It sounds like a minor difference but the visual impact of seeing the foliage withering away was really satisfying.
Next up is working on Enemies. I found a free scorpion model on Turbo Squid and am going forward with that, any of you know of other places one can find free fauna models?
I was really worried that this project was falling apart before this week but several things have come clicking together.
Models & Animation – Adding a touch of gloss
Worked on updating the graphical appearance of Just Deserts today. Its surprising what a difference throwing some textures on a few models can make.
Ran into some trouble with trying to animations and Mixamo to work. The player model I'm using gets into a walking pose but won't actually animate walking. I'd like to drill down into it but I've got a day-job I have to get away too.
Before
After
Divination — Fortunes
What does the future hold?
There is a for fun Divination aspect to our game fortunes where at the end of the game you get a future generated by how the game went. Since the game play is mostly solid yesterday was working on making this a little bit more visual.
No, not exactly what I meant...
A problem we ran into is the fact that the layouts are pretty large. We have to make the cards tiny to fit on screen or have you scroll forever. So what I've tentatively done is to just have a picture of the layout with boxes for the cards which you click to reveal the detail of the card for that position.
This is a layout for a fortune...
clicking on one of the boxes gives you...
Ignore the silly text, its a place holder just like the art.
For reference the old, boring wall of text version looked like this:
This is a good fortune we promise
So what do you all think? Is this change an improvement? I may add colors or something to distinguish the separate categories within the layout to make it pop a bit more but visual aspects are not my strongest point. As you can tell by looking at the website! Well if you read this far thanks for reading and please share your thoughts.
Screenshot Saturday!
I've avoided doing this in the past because I felt there wasn't enough of a graphical presence to really show off anything. Excuses I say, show a screenshot of what you can! So here we go
pre-UI text only interface
Here we have an android emulator with a chat-like interface for passing messages to a server, and rendering the responses. This is nothing like what the finished result will look like, but its progress. The command in the text line is what produced the above results retyped for illustration purposes.
