2 Devs Talking About The Crazy Things They Do
After nearly 72 hours of working I took a look around and realized that our work area was a little ridiculous:
So many screens!
Notice our leaning tower of Monster in the background! Just wanted to share this with you so you’d feel like you were here with us. OK back to work!
We’re coming up on being half-way through our weekend game dev party and I’m glad to say that we have a lot to show for it. You’ve probably already seen some of the artwork Ryan has created in his last post and I’ve made huge progress with the UI. If things keep going this way we’ll be done with this game in no time!
I’ll try to touch on some of the stuff I’ve worked on during the past day. All of the UI elements besides the achievement/insult bar are up and running. I spent a good amount of time coding debugging the animations for the timer and multiplier bars to make sure that they’d work on different size screens. I got pretty lucky on this one because the animations ran fine on my phone, but I tried running the game on a 320×240 screen to test for another issue and discovered they weren’t running properly there. Thankfully it didn’t take very long for me to figure out what the issue was. (Designing for different size screens is pretty much the most difficult thing about working with the Android platform)
Woo! So after 24 hours of working, we have some pretty nice stuff to show off. Right now I’m going to give you a peek at the artwork for two more of our games, ‘Balloon Popper,’ and ‘Sink Da Battleship.’ (Ignore the UI text, it is just an example overlay; each game will have it’s own descriptive text in the bottom portion.)
Now we don’t want to give away any more details on how the games will actually work or how they progress as levels get higher, so for now all you can do is feast your eyes on these screenshots. It’s back to work for me on some more Main Menu screens and UI work.
I’ve finally arrived here in DC, and I’m ready for a long weekend of work. First order of business, however, is to bring you up to speed on the art end of things here for UPSAT.
Art Style:
UPSAT is going for a cartoonish, fun, casual feel for art. We want to lull you in, nice and gently, then, “BAM!” welcome to the world of pain and frustration. For the backgrounds I am dropping the heavy black outlines in exchange for a clean, sleek, readable environment that doesn’t take away from the main gameplay objects. The gameplay objects, however, will have the characteristic black outines to differentiate them from the background and help the player to more easily recognize them. In such a fast-paced game, visual clues like this will greatly enhance usability.
Where Are We Now?
You’ve made it to the final chapter of my novel! We’ve covered a lot of ground these past few days, and by now you’re probably starving for some real info about our game. Well don’t worry, papa’s gonna feed you baby birds:
Oh, that's nice
BAM! Wow! Is that not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life?!?!?! Don’t answer, that was rhetorical dummy. I know your mouth is probably agape in amazement right now, so I’ll give you a second to compose yourself before I continue.