Hello friends! We are back from a week of brainstorming with a pretty solid plan for completion, as well as some significant progress on new fronts. Joar will be back to devlogging tomorrow, so in the meantime ill bring the log up to date a bit so he can hit the ground running. Pardon, most of these images are big so might need some scrolling.
Food UIThis is something that has been discussed a lot over the course of the devlog, but now its actually in the game and functional (amazing!) Replacing the old "number appears over the head" when consuming bats and other foods, now we have this minimal circles and lines system that will appear and disappear from the bottom left:
I think its a little large right now, but thats super easy and we'll play with that a bit later. Simple UI, but gives us a clear way of communicating some key things beyond just "food eaten":
just ignore the typo on "demarcates"
Map UIThis is a biggie and im sure there will be opinions. As much as we'd like it to be otherwise, given the ridiculously huge size and complexity of the game world it would be heinous to not include a map function for the player.
Here is an early mockup of the map overlay:
Fairly self-explanatory, the map will fill in as the player moves through the world and the red circle indicates the location of the player. Food sources that are discovered will be indicated on the map, as well as possibly locations of player deaths and other important information. Left shoulder button will bring up the map, and D-pad movement will switch to map scrolling, allowing the player to plot new routes, see areas they may have missed, etc. Time will proceed as normal when in the map (so player can be eaten or rained on, etc), so the background will be semi-opaque, allowing to player to see if a predator is sneaking up.
One thing that we are concerned with is avoiding a situation where the player “plays” the map, running around with it semi-opaque, or quickly tabbing in and out like its a HUD, etc etc. Our concept for this is something like the slugcats visual memory, which requires some time and concentration. So the idea is that the player finds a safe place to hide for a minute or two and think hard about where its been. The map will appear at first to only be the nearby surrounding area and far off locations will take a little while to fill in, etc. This vibe stuff will be dealt with after the map is functionally implemented so we'll talk more on that later.
Problems:
Here is what Joar has in the currently implemented version:
Looks decent so far, but one thing you will notice is that it still seems pretty blockly... like a series of interconnected single screen rooms. because thats what it is
Thats not the visual impression we want to give, and its going to be a bit of a biggie to fix. We want to move the world map from its current room by room layout into visually cohesive region maps that show consistent movement through 2d space. And heres how we plan on doing that:
**Heavy Industry Map spoilers ahead**
Here is a shot of the current crude devtool map for Heavy Industry region:
Notice that there are plenty of chaotic connections and bits that dont make sense on a 2d plane. Thats my fault. Initially the game concept was "popping in and out of rooms of vague distances apart, and not necessarily all on the same axis" rather than the current "large structurally cohesive regions on a 2d plane" concept that we've evolved into.
Fortunately, with minor adjustments, it starts to make more sense:
And you can imagine that adding a connecting room here and there will make it even more clear.
Since Ill be going back through the levels and regions in polish pass anyways (starting today!), part of my work will be remixing the earlier chaotic regions into these more structurally cohesive forms. Joar will then take these "canonical room placements" and stylize them a bit, with the output being a region map thats something like this where "it all makes sense":
We think this will add a lot to the player experience, allowing them to piece together the "puzzle" of the world map with a visually satisfying end result. This will also give the regions themselves more of an individual personality and "vibe" beyond just an endless series of rooms.
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