Dev Blog 2016–11–01
I’m wrapping up the version of the system view that I’ve been working on for a few weeks. I have a few lighting tweaks to make.
After that, I’m going to do a cleanup pass through the system and planet generator code and through the system scene code. Shouldn’t take long, but if I don’t write some code comments in here, I will forget how everything works in about a week. Such is the life of a developer.
Here’s a recent screenshot, by the way:
The next major chunk of work is to build the in-game UI. I’ve noticed most solo devs and small studios wait until the end to handle menus, but in my case, I need to start early, and give myself a style guide for the rest of the build. Since this game is driven by written narrative, figuring out how words will be presented on the screen is important. I need to make some decisions early and carry them consistently throughout the game.
I’m also considering a lot of platforms and inputs for the game — I want the game to be playable with a mouse, but also with controllers and on touch screens. This will be a tall order if I don’t start by figuring out a menu system that can flex for those methods of input and adjust to different screen sizes.
I’ll start the process with a lot of low fidelity thumbnail sketches. When I start a new UI, I force myself to do 10 really rough sketches in 10 minutes with different concepts. How rough? Here’s some from when I started the system scene:
Then I do pros and cons of each idea. I think about whether I like each sketch aesthetically, but I also think about whether the sketch meets the design goals (in this case, for example, cross platform flexibility).
From there, I usually take 2 or 3 and combine aspects of them into a single design. I do a larger, higher fidelity sketch. I mark that sketch up with annotations so I don’t forget what I was thinking and capture any functional / moving aspects of the UI. Once that’s done, I usually go right to code. I’m not really a photoshop person.
I expect the first pass UI to take me a few weeks all together.
