Design Compasses Part II

Here's the first look at one of Wasco's design compasses.

1st version of a collection of design compasses for Wasco in the much popular MindMap format.

The design, feel and the script of Wasco belongs to the jojoOfGrayLake and having seen the material produced and what we've discussed along the way I've made the first version that closely manifests our ideas. I've sent him this mindmap for him to remove the misfitting keywords and add those he thinks are missing. In essence this map will grow and change over time, however, as long as something drastic isn't happening to the concept at hand, the rough direction should'nt stray too far.

Here's an improved version of the same mindmap.

An updated 2nd version of the aforementeioned MindMap file.

When a teammate suggests that we add a health potion to this game we know it's not thematically compatible to have it exist as such because our hero is a robot and has no biological parts, also there are no alchemists in Wasco. An actual drinkable magical potion with red liquid that heals the player isn't the right theatrics. We need this health potion to be something futuristic* that belongs to a robot-civilization* and will heal Wasco by repairing* his circuits*. This way we can reach concepts such as a repairbot kit or a nanobot canister and hit the person who recommended a glimmering red health potion in the head with our compass. (*: All green words actually belong to our mindmap in the picture above.)

I hope this gives you an idea of how we're approaching and policing the content on Wasco. There are exceptions of course but we're out of scope already.

Working on splash-screens and a progress-bar for Wasco

At the day I was writing this blog I had laid some design work early on. After I was done with that I decided it would be a good idea to focus on something trivial and not too tiring because handling design is almost always something that requires a lot of critical thinking. One of the things I learned the hard way is that if you're in any kind of development you'll need to manage the stamina of your head. If brains were made of muscles, critical thinking would definitely be in the bunch. It is possible to exhaust this 'muscle' and even overuse it to the extent of needing several days for it to recuperate. Bottom line is that you should watch out for yourself. Burning out and stacking exhaustion is a must avoid! (Unless it's absolutely necessary for short-term once every blue moon.)

I took the initiative to wait on more critical features and  ended up working on the splash-screens for Wasco. (Obviously different teams will have different pace and due dates. I was able to afford taking this 'break'.) Below is a .gif of what I was able to do in approximately two hours time.

The end product. A cascade of splash screens working as intended.

It was a bit of puzzle solving since Unity has deprecated some of the older syntax but being such a popular and well maintained engine, documentation is almost never a problem. Below is a screenshot of the inspector for the script I wrote for this.

Inspector view for the Splash.cs script.

The script uses a coroutine to wait for a few seconds before fading in. Then it will fade in with the specified speed. Then it will wait as long as its specified show duration. After that the splash-screen will fade out with specified speed and once it reaches the life cycle of a splash screen it will activate the next splash screen in line if there's one specified.

Hope you enjoyed this, next up is more mindmaps and design compasses regarding Wasco.

PS: Unity now has a built-in splash system and since that came out I converted to using that.

Design Compasses Part I

So this is something very important in regard to making any kind of content, that your product should be coherent. Whether it's a painting of a friend, design schematics for a racecar or the plot for a fiction novel one would desire created content be 'successful.' Pushing out high quality material requires the maker not to display instability or incoherency. If you were to see someone wearing a business suit except khaki shorts for pants at a meeting you'd find it distracting to say the least.

This gentleman does a good job keeping the colors cohesive.

Unfortunately hard to say the same for the cut.

As you're building a game, a world or a story you have to pay attention to various aspects such as the 'tone' of the writing or the 'look' of the game or the 'feel' of the gameplay. Nailing these things down takes effort and keeping it uniform and cohesive becomes just as troublesome over time. In order to alleviate this situation a good idea is to come up with 'compasses' that will guide you, and your team if you have one, and will act as a safety mechanism for differentiating concepts that belong to your game from those that don't. This strategy is useful regardless of the size of your team.

Above, the original and a spoof splash of Diablo III juxtaposed.

So what are these compasses and how can you make them? A design compass will display you the direction the vision dictates. Whenever you steer far away from your compasses' needles you'll end up with misfit material that needs to be scrapped. Above pictures shows the illustration of an artist who chose to stray away from the compass purposefully in order to make a funny spoof splash.

In the upcoming post I'll make and display some of the compasses I've made for Wasco. (Click here to go to part II.)

(Note-1: In some cases coherency won't be what you desire but even that will be the manifestation of a solid ideology of incoherency. Being incoherent then is interpreted as being coherently incoherent.
Note-2: There also could be an argument regarding the picture I posted here. One could say this is against norms we've created thus we perceive this elderly gentleman as dressing wrong. You're right and there are deeper levels to this discussion but we'll leave that for another time.)

Wasco Gameplay Part I - Inspirations

Since this blog is new there isn't much information about the type of game Wasco will be. In this post I'll try to answer that a little bit. We're not planning for Wasco to feature any avant-garde gameplay mechanics during this time. The game is as simple as an old school rpg gets and will feature a top-down gameplay with 2-D tiles. We'll be setting up an art-style sheet that heavily inspires from the graphics style of retro-rpgs such as Pokémon, Final Fantasy and Secret of Mana.

A screencap from either Pokémon FireRed or LeafGreen. 

A screencap from Secret of Mana.

A screencap from Final Fantasy V.

Much like most top-down rpgs you will be navigating on an x and y axes, picking up items, talking to npcs and fighting battles where you'll have to spill some wires to survive! Talking about wires, next post will tell you a little bit about the setting and the atmosphere.

First post!

Hi there,

This blog is going to be about a video game called Wasco and I'll be posting updates about the development process here.

Hope you like what you see and welcome!