Progress 26–02–26

Palindrome?

Looking into User Interface:

I like Forza UI… but I might see something better out there, lets have a look. Lets look into some youtube videos..

OHNOES somebody made a fun video…

So, almost fell into the trap of discovering a new youtuber and binge watching ALL their content. But I am strong and focuseed, I can keep my eye on the goal: learning and getting inspired about UI design… No sidequests! None! … really.

[embed]

Of course the classics, because I LOVE skeumorphism, even though everybody tells me it’s a bad idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-auyB19Mc6U

Design decisions:

So I want players to support each other, basically, I need a mechanic in the game that entices players to “do better”.

Any game mechanic that stops a player from playing is a nono in my view: I hate having to wait on the sidelines untill respawn or somesuch. I want to make it as following: the more players manage to reach the end of a level “correctly”, the more points get assigned.

This also might make the game viral, as the more players play (and play well), the higher the potential score would be. So I settled on a simple mechanic: my current “game carrot” is player highscore, and as such, I’ll simply add a multiplier at the end of the level that is a function of “surviving” players. It might be 2x multiplier for every ship at full health, down to 1.2 multiplier for a player that has 1/5th health left.

Found a design issue:

Great, I just figured out I don’t have a “blue shell” type scoring system, and I want one. I want to have a bit of excitement at the end of a level, and I want the ranking of scores to change, I’ll need to come up with a mechanic for that, to keep people invested in seeing the scores, as I know a score isn’t a carrot to everybody, but ranking might be.

So I took a walk and came up with a solution. “selflessness”: basically if a player takes a hit while being in front of another player, they get a bonus multiplier for each hit they took that way. It will take a little fine tuning but I think I can make it work and thus give players with less skill a morale boost.

Shmerketting:

I had a short discussion with the maker of Paddlenoid about marketting budgets and how to make the (money) math work. And we came to the conclusion there are ways to recognise whether a game is going to succeed. One thing that needs to be done: put a demo out there as soon as possible, to demonstrate a vertical slice of the game. And I might have to do some live demo’s at events to showcase the game. And I’d like to take pictures of people playing the game… which is a bit of logistical nightmare when you need about 16 to 32 people to agree on their picture being taken for marketting purposes. I’ll probably discuss this with my contacts at sickhouse at the opening party tomorrow.

Planning update:

Looking at my schedule I put Q1 2027 on the one map for early access start, and Q3 2027 for the first 6 levels playable with friends base pack.

Design Notes on UI:

Inspired by the interface inside a plane, try to convey the same impression to the UI. This means: the user avatar is wearing gloves, tactile interfaces need physical (big) buttons. I’ll have to try a few things. I’m also thinking about a “menu minimap”, some UI “greeble” that shows a roadmap from the first “start game” button to actually starting the level. I hope this “mini map” will help met get the UX flow correctly.

Closing note:

It’s fine… I made backups.

ANd the article needed an image, so I just took whatever was currently on my 3D printer ( a vase I designed).