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[Fluff]

Thanks for the encouragement! I fiddled with the player colors some more and I came up with something I'm pretty happy with. I still have to work on the level/item colors, though. I am thinking dark floors and light-colored walls and items to help them stand out. One problem I've finding is everything is just so small, it can hard to read. Especially with four people looking at one monitor.




Progress Report #9

Dispite having just 2D HUD things to work on, I tried at first to put a mockup together in blender for the final scoreboard. I soon realized that wasn't going to work very well. So I gave that up and went to GIMP for the 2D stuff.

The first thing I tried was making a decal for the scoreboard. I had an idea for a "MOST KILLS" kind of award every round. So I looked up reference images. Ok, how would I make that in GIMP? I had about 4 hours total experience in GIMP. So I found some tutorials. I was almost done with this one (wondering why all the buttons got moved) before I realized it was for photoshop, not GIMP.

So, I ended up with this.

That was a good warm up, but I wasn't very happy with it so I tried the same technique again.

Ok, that felt better. But here I am working on the details before starting anything else. No sense adding bumper stickers before the plane can fly. So I put together a mockup of the scoreboard.




Something like that will work. So I went to look for some free fonts to use. Looking for reference images of the Casbah last week, I also found a lot of images with "Casbah" in different typefaces. So I had an idea of what I was looking for. First I found this:



Which was really good but what else could we find? Then I got really lucky and found slugfest on 1001fonts's "Font of the Moment."



This looked great, but would it work in the game? I plugged it in and found it really transformed look. It's amazing the difference a font can make! I ended up changing all the menu buttons and adding more buttons and menus just to show off the font. Before I knew it, I had a first draft of the new main menu.



But I still had to do the scoreboard. So I put together another mockup using the new beautiful font.



In order to keep the look consistent with the rest of the menus, and because I thought it would be easier, I implemented the scoreboard using Unity's GUI system. Once you get GUIStyles and GUISkins down, it's pretty simple.



It still needs some tweaking. Maybe moving the coin further left or to where it was in the first mockup. But I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. Overall it was a lot of fun working on the GUI system -- fiddling with the layout, adding little things like confirmations and submenus.


For the last week:
Proper item models.
Finalize level model.
In-game instructions / How To Play.
Revamp effects system.
Secret stuff.

There's not many people in the world with the time and interest in giving a thoughtful critic to a stranger's incomplete student-film-quality video game, but if anyone has advice on finding and encouraging these exceptional creatures, let me know!

Only one progress report left.. and then RELEASE! See you there.

[davidp]

this looks like a very nice game judging by screenshots and what you wrote about it
can't wait to try it

[Inanimate]

I think using that font for the menus might be a bit... cluttered, as it undermines the 'style' of the title. Stick to a simpler font for the menus, perhaps?

Also, that title screen is stylin'.

[DrOctapu]

You might wanna stick the image at the top of the topic under Current State. People might think it's a mockup.

[Fluff]

Haha, ok, I took your suggestion DrOctapu.

Thanks for all the feedback guys!!

I threw together some variations on the title screen for comparison. I tried the same font on the buttons (as the title) -- better/worse?

(Click for full size)

A


B


C


D


E


Maybe it's just initial exposure bias, but I kind of like the heavier slugfest for the menu buttons. Do the buttons seem too heavy, too crowded? Or do they just conflict with the title?

Maybe if the title is larger to balance the weight (see screenshot E)? I really appreciate your input Inanimate, keep me updated on your impressions!

I've been playing with different titles, but I think I like the simple "Casbah."




While I'm here I may as well show you the current progress on the items. I think the umbrella needs the most work.





Also, I may as well share the resources I've been going through in my research since the last progress report. It might be helpful to someone.

Doing GUI stuff was a good excuse to read up on basic design principles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_elements_and_principles

This one got me thinking about different possibilities for the title screen.
http://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=832

Some good advice as typeface applies to video games.
http://kotiro.petermichaud.com/visual/studies/text-font/

Interesting paper on TF2 visual design.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CEIQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.140.8640%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&ei=N3BkTYSCA8OB8gaFkaW7Bg&usg=AFQjCNFHCJwDoseeK_fRsxp-gRoLQLxNDA

Haven't read this one yet but I really admire the TF2 design so it's on the TO READ list.
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4338&page=3

[Inanimate]

B, definitely.

"Casbah" is the best.

[Fluff]

Ok, thanks for your input! I actually was leaning more towards E, but I'm planning on giving the title screen an overhaul this weekend so we'll see how that looks. I like slugfest on the menu buttons because I've tried to use the look to guide the rest of the game aesthetic. Short, round, curvy, fun, silly. Not sure if I really succeeded (note the level is still square), but that was the intention anyway.


Progress Report #10

I'm pretty happy with the current state of things. All the major work is done and we're really just making small minor changes. My sister came over and helped tweak some things and we tried out some new colors. She is a visual GURU and helped out a lot.



I like the level colors, but I'm still not sure about the player colors. They were somewhat inspired by this reference:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/francescocavalli/2891588876/

But there are a few concerns lingering. Now that the coins are bluish, I don't feel like there is enough contrast with the purple player color. Indecently, we changed the coins to blue to not blend in with yellow, but then ended up dropping yellow because it was too bright and stood out against others. So we are almost back to the same coin-matching-player problem. We could try yellow coins again, but now I really like the idea of silver coins looking blue from the twilight. Anyway, there's still time to fiddle with it.


If found a great resource for Casbah architecture reference shots.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=870116&page=3

But flickr and google images also were quite helpful.
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=casbah&w=all&m=&s=int&mt=&referer_searched=1#page=4
http://www.google.com/images?q=Kasbah+des+Oudaias+in+Rabat,+Morocco&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1297&bih=911


For this weekend:

• Some minor item tweaks
• Title screen revamp

That's about it. If there's time,

• Some simple trap items
• Music

[Fluff]

RELEASE

(See the first post for download and information.)


(Click for full size.)

This weekend I finished some final tweaks and bug fixes, made a basic icon and splash screen, and added a silly cheat screen if you right click on the moon. Oh, and I added a simple bomb trap.

I guess this is the end! Overall this was a great experience. It was a wild ride but I learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and got further than I ever thought I would. The game didn't turn out too bad either!

Big thanks to TIGSource for putting the competition together, the other developers for setting such high standards, and everyone else who just hung around, gave feedback, and made it such a great atmosphere. Thanks guys, I've had a blast!

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

Increpare, Terry Cavanagh, Sophie H and I tried this game for a while.

Unfortunately we couldn't get it working with four players. We had three controllers and a keyboard, but it just wasn't working correctly, and there was enormous lag/slowdown with the graphics even on a good spec machine. Also, it's impossible to reconfigure the controls in the launcher.

I love the graphics otherwise, and was very much looking forward to this. It's a shame that Unity's controller/input system is so awful, I'm faced with similar challenges with games I make here onward.

[Fluff]

Thanks for trying it guys! Sorry it did not work out.

Your feedback is very helpful. This is what I'm learning: at a basic level, your game must at the very least work... without hiccups. Especially with 80 other games (and that's just the games in this compo) to try, your game has to work smoothly and intuitively. You are competing with nothing short of an entire world full of alternative activities.

The slowdowns you're seeing could be attributed to a light source I put on each player at the last minute. This feels like a mistake now. If anyone else is getting slowness, you can disable the point lights by going to the main menu -> right clicking the moon -> unchecking "Radioactive Players." That's probably at least one source of slowness.

Input was always a problem during development but I never took the time to focus on it. It always came up at playtests and it was mentioned here to. I selectively ignored this feedback, because I never saw fixing it as a priority. Even from the first post, I said, "I'm going to stick with the cozy idea of 4 people 1 keyboard." It was as though I designed it to be troublesome. As learned from this guy, there's no protecting "against intending to write the wrong thing."

Of course hindsight is 20-20. At the time, I didn't think I could even finish a game. So I pushed aside what I saw as unnecessary polish to focus on what I saw as essential functionality. But there's no sense decorating a room if the door is jammed.

So, I think the lessons here are:

• Don't add new features at the last minute if you can help it (maybe if they're off by default).
• Test on all kinds of machines.
• Focus on basic accessibility first, then depth.
• You can't protect against your own assumptions. At the very least...
• Be careful how you filter feedback from playtesters. If anything is annoying them, think how much worse it will be for the end-user.

All important lessons! (Hopefully I'm taking away the correct lessons from this ) Thanks a bunch guys.

[Hayden Scott-Baron]

Don't worry about it too much, these lessons are all super valuable! It's hard to imagine how the mass of 100 games can seem when people are voting for them, and it becomes rather brutal especially when faced with tech problems. Any game that required an installer, for example, just gets dismissed entirely.

So, wait, there was keyboard support? How was that setup? 

We had three USB keyboards, and played many of the games on keys only, but we couldn't find any indication of keyboard support at all. The unity launcher made no reference to keyboard settings, and neither did the docs. We checked the readme and the thread. There was some significant effort put in here - we wanted to play! XD

[Starflier]

You know, the slowdowns were annoying, but when I set down to play through the compo entries with my brother, this was on of three that we really got into. The light theme, and the Zelda-Esque gameplay, the ability to steal from eachother's chests (This we learned about around our third playthrough, it was great...) There's a lot of good meat here, and it just needs a spit-and-polish, which I think could be said about almost every single other game on the roster here.

[Fluff]

Hey guys! Thanks for all your thoughts. It really means a lot to me!

Hayden Scott-Baron: I appreciate your efforts! Unfortunately I made controls pretty convoluted and I realize now it's completely undocumented. Keyboard support is on by default and can be customized under the "Controls" on the main menu. To use a joystick, the intent was to be able to setup controls for four different joysticks (numbered 1-4) in the unity launcher and then select your joystick number in the in-game "Controls" menu. But, joystick support never got fully tested. When we play we usually used two keyboards: players 1 and 2 using WASD & ARROW KEYS at one keyboard and players 3 and 4 using IJKL and the KEYPAD on a second.

Starflier: Thanks for the kind words!

About slowdowns: I tried the game on two more computers: a laptop with integrated graphics and my brother's desktop. I had performance issues on both. Disabling radioactive players and setting the "Graphics quality" to "Fastest" on the unity launcher seemed to help on my brother's desktop, but neither trick helped on the laptop (which was slow enough to be completely unplayable).