Our demo is currently full screen in the browser window. We hope to keep a full screen mode, but for the most part, we would like to distribute this game through portals. I worked on some very rough UI concepts today. I did a bunch of thumbnail sketches and trolled google images for inspiration.
I looked at some gorgeous winter shots of Norway including this dwarvish gem:
source:
adverblog Norway AdGoogle images also has an immense catalog of screen shots, and I grabbed several for reference and added them to a folder in my photoshop file. Like websites, games share the concept of learned behavior; that players expect keys to do certain things and the HUD (heads up display) to have a consistent lay out across games. This isn't stealing.
source:
Maple StoryCurrently, we're not teaching you how to play the game but one jumps by pressing the up cursor [the left/right cursors move the character] but I expected to be to jump pressing the space bar when John first showed me his prototype.
In order to resolve this, we will be adding an options panel so that you can easily map your own keyboard controls. We could also allow you to move around HUD elements but this will probably have undesired consequences and might clash with gameplay.
Since we wish to distribute our game to various portals, I decided to mock up what Digger Dwarves would look like in
New Grounds. I also used one of my favourite indie game success stories,
Alien Hominid, to help with scale which made it obvious that our current character - the black square - is far too small for the planned art work which is heavily influenced by the Korean
super deformed art style.
With the New Grounds shell in place, its clear that we need to use these screen limitations to create a view port for our game. This defines the drawing area, and anything outside this space could be dormant (or removed from the stage entirely) to improve performance.
You may be wondering why we're coding before we even know what we're doing?! We're following a light
Agile methodology. We have a private wiki with a backlog of player stories, and we've decided on a feature set for a two-week sprint. So we do have some idea of what we're doing. Some.
