Big Game Project, Final Post

So one month has past since the project ended. So what did we end up with?

We have a working level and I'm happy with what we accomplished in such a short time even though the game is lacking in certain areas like UI functionality and maybe some gameplay mechanics.
I do however like the graphical style of the game and the feeling it gives when played.

The last week of the project I went back to working with the UI again with help of the graphical artists we remade the whole UI. 

The main menu now has 3D text and is a proper menu level. I't still needs some work but is overall quite okay. The buttons in each screen is in different positions and need some more work to have good consistency. It's good custom to place the buttons in the similar area in all screens so the player don't have to look for them as soon as a menu screen is changed. Some tweaking needs to be done with that but It's working for now.

In the actual game we replaced the boring placeholder art for our HUD and we finally added our real UI made looking like background vegetation.

(The old UI)

(The new UI)

The UI seemed to be accepted and used by the players. The experienced players (players who had played 2-3 times) could easily interact with the UI and knew what it all meant.
New players had problems though. almost none of them saw the blinking "C"-Leaf when a level was gained. By clicking the C-Leaf button the character screen opened up so the player could increase the players attributes gained by the new level. If the new player did not see that he missed to increase the stats and was too weak to handle the coming challenges and died easily as a result.

Some players also had problems feeling the sense of danger because of lacking UI interactions with the player when the health was low, In lack of particle effects or visual effects and sound effects. Not much warned the player that just got hit by a "You lose screen" when the health reached zero.

I have learned a lot from this project. one of the biggest lessons is that UI takes A LOT more time than you think. It's not something you just slap onto the game afterwards. It needs to be iterated upon again and again....and again....and then some more and when you think you are done you need to remake the whole thing and work on it some more.

Here are two more screens of what the game looks like in action:

A BIG thank you to my amazing group!