A new month has passed and as always, a lot of new features made their way to Naker edition tool. Our focus this month was to make the Intales (Interactive Digital Tales) easier and more obvious to use whether you are on a computer or a smartphone while keeping in mind the gamification angle 🎮 of the Intales. Let’s look at what has changed and what it means for you designers, freelancers, developers, poppers, etc.
CAMERA DESIGN
We notice a bug on some of the Intales where the camera was doing very strange stuff going in circle and spinning 🔄 where it shouldn’t. It was very annoying to find the issue as we were sure our point of vue rotations calculations were correct. Turns out that indeed everything was well calculated, and everything we saw in the journey panel too. But there was something missing in what we saw!
I made a test where I managed to have the exact same point of vue direction where the rotations of the point of vue weren’t the same. So, it made it even weirder that it already was. In fact, our design of the point of vue wasn’t precise enough. You could know the direction of it, but you couldn’t know if the camera was upside-down 🙃. What we did to avoid that was to make our point of vue more precise by adding a top arrow specifying the upper part.
HOTSPOT LABEL AND INTERVAL
We wanted the hotspot to be more visible and catchier. Many of you told us that it wasn’t obvious we could click on hotspots and it was often considered as elements part of the scene. So not really what a Hot-Spot is supposed to do. We then did two things to make them more appealing.
First from now one, you will be able to specify a range 📐 where the hotspot should be present or not along the journey. Thus, you can make the hotspot appears at the right time depending on its position and the progress in the journey. And when the hotspot shows, it makes a nice effect which attracts the visitor attention so that he can focus on what you want to show him.
Secondly, we added a label option 🏷️ for every hotspot. If you select it, there will be a label linked to the scene hotspot and containing the title of your text. Thanks to that label you can have your visitor know what is behind the hotspot and what it will talk about. Plus, as it looks like a button, this is more obvious that you can click on it!
PROGRESS BAR AND VIRTUAL JOYSTICK
The other thing that wasn’t clear enough for people using a Naker’s Intale was the scroll. We did add a scroll indication at the beginning of our scene to make visitor understand Intale were based on scroll but there were still people trying to drag the camera in order to look everywhere around them as you would do in some other 3D players. But we truly believe the use of the scroll is the best way to make you and your visitor travel in a 3D scene. Furthermore, we also want you to use it as a piece of cake 🍰. We decided to add too main things in order to have you understand how it works straight away.
A progress bar at the bottom of the Intales 🏃♀️. This progress bar shows your progress in the Intale and where the hotspot appears. Thus, you see that there is a start and an end of the Intales and that you are not free to go anywhere you want as you must follow the path.
A virtual joystick 🎛️ next to the progress bar which clearly shows you that you must go up and down in order to progress in the scene. Indeed, we used arrows which react to how fast you are traveling the Intales and an analog at the middle that you can drag and drop to go up or down.
POSTPROCESS
This is basically some cool effects that you can add to your scene. They are call post process because those effects are applied after the scene is rendered. There is several of them which you can play with. It will allow you to polish up the main style of your scene. These options are available at the environment level in the Naker editor.
Note that the Intale’s UI will not be impacted by these effects like text or the progress bar and virtual joystick we just talk about.
CONCLUSION
This month more than the precedent, we took the time to really listen to your expectations and what was understood or not. It pushes us to rethink some aspect of the Intales and make them a lot better so thank you for that. We will definitely continue in that direction and your feedbacks will always be more than welcome 💌!
Check this scene where you can see everything explained in this #CFM: HARDWINO
