The return | Editor | New Members
Hey guys, over the past few weeks I've been attempting to get back into the swing of things. Thankfully some new kind souls have come forward in hopes of aiding me on this adventure that is Runed's development.
New Concept Artist
The first person I'd like to mention that's been added to the team is our new concept artist! She's already shown some promise and interest in the project, which is great. Here's some of the concept images we've had created over the past few days
New Pixel Artist
Next up is our new pixel artist, aka
Skarik. You may have seen him before from his posts on TIG, particularly
AFTER, or even
Project M03.
For more information on either of these projects, be sure to head over to
Epic House Studio's Site for more information.
[Disclaimer - I am not affiliated with Epic House Studios, I simply wish to bring a bit of publicity to someone who was kind enough to offer to help with this project. ]
The Editor
Finally, we arive at the editor.(Which by this point I might as well say editor
s). I've made several iterations on the Runed Editor, however I believe it's time for me to part ways with it given the new tools provided in the latest alpha build of Unity. Finally, after all of this time, there is a dedicated 2D tilemap editor. This means I can stop worrying about file formats, how the editor's UI should work, how I can efficiently load in 17,500 tiles(50x50 map, 7 layers at the time), along with the worries of having all of our files out in the open for anyone to reap the rewards.
Anyways, back to the new editing tools. Here's a gif of it in action:
Stolen Borrowed from Unity's
blog on the matter.
UI Work
As of late I've been working on recoding a lot of things, in order to get it up to par and independent from the editor/level loading system. One of the things I decided that should be redone is the character UI. To start, here's a gif of the previous interface:
I'm aware that this is in the old art style.. don't kill me please ;-;Aside from the lack of general motion, there is no depth being conveyed or sense of these stones actually being in the world. Not that I want to have shadows coming off of them or anything, but it'd be nice for them to feel
there.Not to mention my lack of image effects for focusing on the UI, no darkened background, blur, vignette, etc.
Which brings me on to the
new UI. I knew that making a simple sliding menu wouldn't work, as frankly it's just boring. After meddling around for a few hours and catching up on
Full Metal Alchemist, I realized that we could use something akin to the transmutation circles found in the show, as our character is basically transmuting himself into another form in the first place. With this in mind I created a small non functioning UI script that could convey my idea. This is what I ended up with:
Now, there's quite a few problems with this:
- The lines in the center are crossing over the player, which clashes with him being unblurred/brought to vision.
- The lines connecting the runes on the outer edge simply look too harsh/jagged.
- Kinda looks like a pentagram..
- There still just isn't enough movement to it.(I know this is a still screenshot, but you'll just have to trust me on this one.)
After thinking about this for a while, I made another mockup, this time animated.
I removed the inner lines, and made a horrible mockup circle image. The particle effects came about whilst I was messing around with the thought of particles shooting into the player from each rune, however I later settled on them radiating out of the player himself.
Next we have the final(current) version: (note - I mean
final as in "good enough to move past it for now.")
Now, here's what I changed/did differently:
- Added a circle being drawn procedurally around the outer edge, this is the same circle that my code uses to plot where each icon will go.(Note - yes, that means it can support up to ~20 icons at a time, with the only border being displaying all of the sprites in such a confined space)
- Added back lines between each rune, however not clashing across.(This way they don't interrupt the player's visual.
- Tweaked the circular motion when moving the rune icons, along with adding left and right movement.
- Added a nice fade in to the background blur, as it seemed a bit too abrupt for my taste.
- Made the rune circle(wheel?) smoothly fall in from the top of the screen. I've toyed with the idea of having it randomly come in from a randomized direction onscreen, but never looked further into it.
- (Minor)Made those blasted particle effects start only when the rune ui is ready, and not 'pop' on screen like before.
I do however still have a few gripes about it, though:
- The player's feet cut too sharply on the ground
- The drop-in from the top of the screen still feels a bit strange
All in all, it's definitely good enough to press on into further development.
Thanks for reading! I know I haven't updated this devlog in a long while(I've come to find that scheduled posting is my mortal enemy), however I hope I can start back posting here again with updates as things progress.
Cheers!
