DevBlog - New Home Interface & GUI updates

Hello all,

I hope you guys have been enjoying your September, I can't believe October is almost upon us! I've been quite busy, doing many different things, but one of those is working on our game! Some of the things I've been working on are hard to show (behind the scenes programming stuff), but some of it is apparent in the interface. I have made a video overviewing the changes below.

If you prefer to read about it (highly unlikely), I'll overview some of what's been going on here and there. One of the main things I've been focusing on is reusable elements within the interface, as well as improving our user interfaces. Matthew and I have been going back and forth, sharing ideas and going through iterations of UI elements, to bring you guys a nice looking user interface. We have created the confirmation window that I think goes a long way to showing you where our user interface is going... I'm very happy with it!

 

I used the confirmation dialog menu to make up the design for our new main menu as well:



Behind this, I developed the functionality behind discarding, working with a players deck, confirming a players choice to continue, and a lot of other things related to ensuring that proper cards are selected, discarded, and not used until the deck is reshuffled.

We've also gone over some changes to the UI interface for various areas of the project, to make things easier, more readable and more professional looking. We will be incorporating these changes to the interface in weeks to come.

Lots of small tedious things to do some simple things on the interface, but really a lot of stuff that just has to get written to go to the next phase.

I also have been discussing different game dynamics with Matthew and we're making a ton of progress on making decisions and moving forward with the game as a whole. We have some more discussions planned for looking at Trap and Upgrade cards this next week. I plan on continuing the menu system process, getting things coded so that we have a working menu, transition to the game, and start planning out the next phase of the player's turn. After that I will be delving into getting all the cards playable within the game.

Thanks for tuning in, I hope you enjoyed this update. I am hoping to update here (as long as there's enough content) every Wednesday.

Take care!

News and updates!

Hello, Hello!

Matthew here with another look at what we've been cooking up at Half Heart Games. Lets jump right in!

Let me begin with giving a little info on what Haddy has been up to. He has been hard at work, slaving away at his computer. So far he has been making it possible to draw cards, discard cards, confirm the discard, passing turns, turn timers, and setting up some preliminary work on getting multi player up and running. Mind you multi player is  ways away, but we need to get that ground work set up and ready to go.

So like I said, hes been busy! In addition to that he also helps co-host a Unity programming channel on twitch. I'll be sure to post a link ASAP so you can check it out and maybe say hi, or ask him some programmer questions. He is very helpful and knowledgeable!

He'll probably update you all on what hes been up to in greater detail, but I just wanted to ensure you know hes been hard at work, every night plugging away.


What about me, eh?
Well I've been busy as well. I've recently finished modeling all the vessels for the pre constructed decks and textured them all. That was my big task and although it took a while to complete, it was actually faster than I anticipated. It only took me about a month or so and I was expecting it to take two months. So I'm pretty stoked about that!

I've also been talking with Haddy about the GUI, card GUI and the cards themselves. For the GUI we didn't feel it was as good as it could be. We also noticed a few missing pieces, such as a confirm window for when you want to discard - or rather, in case you don't. We'd hate for a player to select a card and accidentally discard it when they meant to play it. That would be pretty suck-tastic and I'd be pissed if I was a player. So we added a confirm window to ensure problems like that don't happen. Take a gander!

 

You may not be able to tell all our changes, unless you are familiar with our previous GUI. But in the image above you can clearly see the Confirm window in the center. We've also added  skip phase button in case you don't want to do a phase. As well as two new pieces of HUD at the bottom center of the screen. These are to show your flotilla when your in battle. The flotilla shown are the ones not currently in battle. This would allow a player to place vessels into those flotilla while you conduct combat.

Please keep in mind that not all of the GUI elements shown above will always be present. This image is just to show the most amount of GUI at once and give you an idea of what it will all look like.

In addition, we added  few textures and minor tweaks to the existing GUI. We hadded a honey comb texture to the top header bar, as well as the resource bar in the bottom left. We also got rid of the glow effect to make it all crisper and cleaner.

Lastly, but not least, we changed up the card design.

 

Let me run you through what you are seeing.

to begin with, the top image is the card when closed, while the bottom is the card while open. I'll discuss the closed one first.

At any given time you'll be able to see the most important info of the card. This includes what type of card it is (vessel, trap or upgrade) denoted by the symbol on the far left side of the card. Next you have the name, indicated here as "This is a long name!!!". Below that, and to the left, is the sub type which would describe what class or group the card belongs to. Such as alpha company, or a drone. Next, below the name and to the right is the attack, defense and movement indicators. Here you'll see how much power, integrity and spaces the ship can move. If the card is not a vessel this piece will not be present, as Traps and Upgrades can't attack, defend or move. Lastly we see a thunderbolt with a 03 following it (on the far right side). This represents the cards cost. This card costs 3 resources, but other cards will cost various different amounts.

Now lets move onto the bottom image, the open card. The only difference here is that when selecting the card it will open to reveal the card image and description. Obviously the image is on the left as indicated by the image. And of course the description is on the right. Pretty straight forward, eh?

Now of course, I always love to leave off with some awesome art, so I present to you the card art for the Simple drone by Chris Stage.

Take care every one and keep an eye out for more info on Fleet Calamity!

And as always, don't forget to follow us on on twitter @HalfHeartGames and like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FleetCalamity