Sep 14, 2011

Assorted Graphic Stuff

Yes, I'm still putting off writing the end of the prologue...
But that just means that I'm being productive in other ways instead. :)

First, I implemented the second of the CGs I recently commissioned. Some of you may have been thinking, "Why the heck would I want to date the evil douchebag who got me kicked out of the castle?" Well, here's a preview of your answer:

 I'll make Neffy fangirls out of some of you yet!

And on that note, being inspired by the CG, I decided to try to fix up Duren and Nef's sprites to make them look a bit better. This is the second time I've given Duren a facelift; if I had the true original I'd show it to you, but alas, I've already destroyed all evidence of that hideous honker he used to have... This time, I tried to shorten his face a little. It may not even be noticeable, since I just changed the positions of the nose and mouth by a few pixels. Nefferon's facelift should be a little more obvious. I slimmed down those big, bushy, ridiculous-looking eyebrows to make them more like in the CG. Also made his mouth smaller so it's more...um...proportional, I guess.

                                       Before                         After

Finally, I spent some time working out the layout for the new-and-improved battle system. I cut out different colored scraps of paper in the shape of the elements I wanted using the screenshot from Aleema's game, featured in my last post, as a reference. Once I had a layout like that, I moved the scraps of paper around into several different arrangements until I found one that I felt was interesting and dynamic, but made sense. Then I threw together some shapes on a background in MS Word and added a few images to create a "sketch" of the layout. Here is what I came up with.

In the blank areas, there will be things like name, class, health bar, rage bar, etc. The big box on the bottom-left is for your current fighter. The tabs are to display different things in the box - stats for health, rage, and EXP meters; attacks to choose which attack to do; items to use an item from your inventory; and "run" will probably be replaced with "Options" to run (skip the battle), switch characters, etc. The three rectangle boxes to the right of that are to display the current status of the other members in your party.

The big box above that is to display the enemy and their health, status, etc. The large rectangle is for the current enemy you're fighting, and the smaller squares under that are for the other members of the enemy party. Yes, the enemy can have more members in their party than you can, but I doubt I'll ever actually use all those slots, except for like big end-of-area battles.The final piece - the box currently showing a random background - will eventually display little illustrations corresponding to the attacks being used.

Hopefully, this new set-up is an improvement over the last with its sucky silhouettes and even suckier animations. Yay for dark black and red themes. :)

No comments:

Post a Comment