Scrap Pirates – Week 6

The sixth week has come to the last day and it’s soon to be only two weeks left. Today we will have our second open play testing and next week will be beta. Things are steadily progressing forward and features keep getting implemented and iterated.

I will firstly present my reiteration of the door panel. We wanted it to grab the attention of players more and communicate it’s purpose more clearly, so I added hands in the center of the panel. The red hand will be slowly fading in and out to catch the players’ attention. When the panel is pressed and turns green, a thumbs up icon is displayed.

While there are countries where a thumbs up sign has a pejorative meaning – such as for example Russia, Greece, countries in West Africa among others – we decided to use this anyway as it is a fairly global sign of approval due to social media.

I have put together a collection of dirt and scratch decals. The tricky part with it was that blending modes such as Multiply in Photoshop won’t be kept as the file is saved to PNG, as well as the risk that the effect would be different if one found a similar function in Unity. Also, different decals would have to use different blending modes and such to get the desired effect that I’ve had in mind during their creation. It would create extra work in Unity if I decided to take that route. So I concluded that the most simple solution would be to adapt all decals to a normal blending mode. Once I had realized this, it wasn’t a difficult thing to change. However, I figured that i had to do this with all other decals that I’ve made as well as they have a shadow outline.

Slicing guide for the person who will implement the decals into Unity; in case the program wouldn’t figure it out automatically. Also with an opaque background so that the decals are visible. On the real sprite sheet they are close to invisible due to their opacity.

The second problem that I had when working on the dirt was that I could not color pick and blend them due to their opacity. The background would affect the picked color in a bad way. What I did was to use the smudge tool instead and blend out  my started cloud of dirt until I got a less detailed and more smooth and painterly feel to it. I did a similar thing to the rust as the orange edges would blend out around the spots.

After that I made a default door with the characteristic black lines of the foreground elements, to make it pop out from the background properly. We thought about adding lights that would shine red when the doors are locked but felt that it looked cluttered. Therefore I kept the dark grey area blank.

What I am working on now is a sudden request that appeared during the week; a force field device which keeps magnetic blocks to pass through. It is deemed required for the level design; so I got to working on it as soon as I got the request. There will be a tilable, long part, a corner part and attachment parts to the ground and walls. It is still WIP and will be changed quite a lot to fit the recent feedback of my other group mates. It will for example change into color scheme similar to the door, get the corner part slimmed down among other things.

That is all for now; until next week!