Magical elements of the world have been created this week, Including the trees where Maive’s magical book comes from. These trees take on a different style to our natural trees, being darker in colour and with bright blue shining fruits. As these are treasured by the islanders, one has been preserved in the centre of the town.
UI Textboxes and buttons were explored this week from our UX designer. We wanted a unique yet simple way to show our text that would make character interactions clear as well as being easily distinguished from the other type of text presented; thoughts and story telling. Some thoughts have also gone into the navigation of the game, from menu screen to ending. Button design has some way to go, as we are stuck between making cute, bold buttons that stand out or more subtle ones to let the visuals take over in hierarchy.
We also began making the text assets for Maive’s storybook in line with development on that mechanic. This task seemed simple enough, but our narrative designer had to think carefully about affordance when it came to indicating the words that players could interact with. Creating affordance will later be passed to our programmer who is a wizard with shaders and particle systems, but for now we needed to consider how to make certain words more eye-catching at a base level. The answer? Make it bigger. Testing revealed that interactable words came at all sorts of points in each line. Sometimes it was the last word in a line, but sometimes it was three words in the middle of one, which meant that putting a word in a different position wouldn’t be possible without really breaking up how the sentence flowed visually. By making the interactable words bigger but still in line with the rest of the text, it jumps out at the player, giving a bit of emphasis, but doesn’t interrupt the flow of the phrase.
Work on the dialogue system was paused for the week and our Programmer did some research on how to set up a system for Maive’s storybook mechanic. Other than that, we also started implementing some of the important animations like walking, talking and idle. This made testing a bit more informative as people could get a better idea of how the main character feels and behaves.
We also chose a serif font for this text, which gives it that traditional storybook vibe, but selected one with a little more interest. “Organic Elements” has a natural flare to it, that looks like vines or branches reaching out from each letter, which fit well with Maive’s world.