Entry #5 - New ui, map, minor improvements

As mentioned in my previous entry, I had some things going on in my private life that stopped the development for some time. I was buying an apartment, doing some renovations, moving in etc. But finally I have new stuff to show you.

UI

I’ve decided to do some ui reskinning, as all the main systems I need are already in place. It’s by no means a final ui design but rather something to eliminate the most jarring part of the experience. I went with a simple, quick theme that I could introduce myself, without any serious artistic skills. All assets creation took me ~week of work, while relearning Photoshop simultaneously as I don’t want to waste too much time on it right now. I’m really happy with the result, it’s much cleaner and informative than previous gray boxes.

As you can probably see, I’ve used ai generated character concepts as portraits for now. They won’t stay there, it’s all just a temporary prototype. After finishing this skinning iteration, I regret that I didn’t go with a slightly greener ui backgrounds. It feels to me a bit too space / sci-fi indicative. But at least I have a good reference point for the next iteration. Also I want to add some texture to the backgrounds and actually pay more attention to proper scaling of ui textures as right now it’s far from perfect.

Various improvements

While working on ui, I was exposed to features that I don't pay too much attention to during everyday development. That made me rework several systems, make them cleaner and more responsive. One of the things I’ve improved by a lot is the way you can build new constructions, providing much more feedback and construction details. Other than that, I finished the third profession, Sage. It introduces the use of crystals that are dropped by more advanced enemies (also new), spawned from better controlled spawn points (new) and can be used to power magic spires (guess what: new!). I also fixed a pile of bugs, improved the camera movement, did a balancing pass and many more.

New map

To utilize new enemy types and weapons, I wanted to create a new map. The Map™ that I would use for several months during development, that I would run playtests on etc. So I did. And it’s bad. It’s actually pretty similar to the previous one, just a bit bigger, with 5 different spawn points, a bit more interesting layout. But it doesn't really make the tactics mechanics pop as I would wish. It also takes me a long time to build a new map as I have zero idea what I'm doing, so making more iterations on it doesn't really make sense to me. After a painful thought process, I came to a conclusion that the iteration time is really the issue. So now I have a new idea on how to approach this. I won’t make new maps starting with landscaping features of Unreal as I did before (I know it's a bad idea to begin with but… well…). I will just create blockouts from huge white boxes, aiming to get a proper gameplay quality instead. And then, once I have a lab white room that feels good to play and that requires some wits to win, I will create a landscape to match this layout. Do I regret not doing this from the start? Not really. At the beginning of the development, my priority was to have a working gameplay on a map that I could use to test on people, even if the map itself wasn't the best. But now it’s time to improve mechanics that I know work and to do this, I need a higher quality map.

It kind of feels like there is no point in iterating particular features faster than others: having ui on production level 2, map on level 1 and gameplay on level 2, it’s impossible to move gameplay to level 3. I need to fix the map first. It makes me feel about pro studios that I've worked with. Discovering huge issues in feature A just before release, after B gets to a state decent enough to fully utilize A. The circle of life.

Next steps

The time to switch from gameplay mechanics to game looks and make more people involved is coming

• Concepts - I seriously need to push this forward. Having first proper concepts will unlock tons of new work for me. This will also allow me to present the game to more people and maybe come up with a more serious game title.

• Fun map blockout - I can play on the current map for 6-7 in-game days. That’s enough for the demo. But I want to make it more fun and require more skills

• Next combat iteration - with a new map, I will most likely have to reiterate on combat

• Consider additional mechanics - I’m thinking about new camp constructions and maybe some new field mechanics. Like creating a “magic powered grid”, using some spires, that would extend the detailed field vision and be required to build defense constructions.