Wroking on the HUD
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It is the final week before the beta. There is lots to be done, and the team is working really hard to see everything finished and presentable. My job this week has been to design the different components of the heads up display, or HUD. This means an inventory bar, a hand slot and a way of presenting the score.
The inventory The inventory had to have four slots, and fit the steampunk theme of the game. This gave me a lot of ideas, and I ended up animating it, to give a more dynamic feel.
The hand slot We also needed somewhere to display the item the player is currently holding. We wanted this to be separated from the rest of the inventory slots, to make it obvious this item is special, since it is the item that will grant you the power up. The hand slot will be displayed in the lower right corner, in opposite to the inventory bar, in the top left. When designing this I was inspired by inventory slots from various role playing games. I wanted the hand to be represented in the slot, but just subtly, so the player understands that its an inventory slot, with sort of a hand icon.
The money bag Lastly, we needed some way to represent the score. Initially, we had numbers, but since the game is targeted for children, we thought there must be a more interesting way to show the score. So, we came up with the money bag. Since the player is playing a burglar, stealing valuables, what better way to present this than through a bag of money? The higher the score, the bigger the bag becomes. The exact score will also be presented in numbers below, since we will have a high score feature. Lastly, we went to see the teacher assistants to get some feedback. Turns out they didn´t like the animated inventory, so I will have to do something about that. They also said the inventory needed more saturated colors, to make it clearly stand out from the rest of the game. Since the game is already very dark, I disagree with this. I believe to saturated colors will steal to much attention from the rest of the game. But out art director agreed on more saturation, so so be it! That´s all for this week. Now it´s just the final week of working before the beta presentation. Thanks for stopping by.  |
