Week 14 - Final week

This week is the week of the deadline and so I intend to be cleaning up my sketchbook work alongside finishing my website. I managed to finish all of the digital requirements for the vertical slice over the weekend including the UI for the scrolling menu background, a 'Try Again' screen, the finished screens for the post-battle collectables and the extra UI requested from our coder - designs for the corners of the screen as a framing aesthetic and brighter pop ups to make each phase clearer.

When it came to making the border the original idea was to have a design around each edge of the screen, however you can see from the images below that when my design was scaled down, the image quality became unusable. Instead the image was extended downwards so as to be used for corner designs. After testing this with the coder, we decided to have only the upper right and lower left corners included so it didnt block any UI already needed for the battles (please see the UI section for details on the process of how these images were made, which software, tools, etc.). I used this same design in various colours to keep the phases consistant but clearly distinct from each other in style.

As we are discussing final details this week we have decided to use some of scrapped UI for menu designs. Instead of having a scrolling background there will be a main menu, an environment showcase and a character showcase, each with its own UI background I had made before. This works very well as we originally had the Sheriff's Office to show where the locations would be and we had later discussed that controls and character profiles would be in the church, so with a little updating these were ready to be used (Note: the flow of the vertical slice menus was determined by our 3D art lead. We realised rather quickly that I had all of the individual UI components so the flow of the menus is her design, I just put the elements together).

This week our team has managed to put together a build of the game as well meaning we can play test it. Its a huge body of work and flows nicely however we did tweak a few details. As a last minute addition a couple of members of the team made working, usable maps to use in the narrative so this has altered our plan again. For me personally I found the first battle very difficult with the amount of enemies, size of the map and a lack of details e.g. without descriptions of what each skill does it was hard to know what I was actually doing as the player. I had a meeting with the coder and we tweaked a few areas such as being able to attack through the grave icons when an enemy dies (I found the enemies would cluster and then I wouldn't be able to attack), we removed the health bar once they died (so as not to confuse the player into thinking they hadn't defeated an enemy) and we made a 'skip' button, so even if the level is too hard, the player wont miss out on the rest of the experience if they want to skip some gameplay.

We also made some very last minute adjustments. Some of the team members only managed to playtest the game the day before our deadline and some of the feedback from that meant we needed to do a few more things. Another team member has written a set of rules for the game but unfortunately these had some incorrect details on and was missing a lot of information. I was needed to make some UI for it and at this point it was too late to adjust within the group and still have it implemented in the game. The coder sent me the information he thought we should include and I used the rules written by our other team member to make something usable for the game. Below are some quick design notes and the final screens added.

I'm not entirely happy with these as there's a lot of information on each screen. I've been trying to avoid overloading the information available at once all project but considering this was made very close to the deadline, I'm glad its there and now implemented in the slice (it was needed).