shade user interface

Nothing yet to report. Please see the Shade prototyping challenge for ideas.

Thinglet

Thinglet is a port (a wrapper indeed) of thinlet into Slick.
The basic idea is to separate user interface from the code, putting in a xml file, so everyone can modify it without recompile the entire source code.
I’m writing this just to remember a cool idea for our shade-ui!

Mock ups

What should you do when you’re stuck with a technical problem? Mock ups! Here’s the first one, please leave feedback below:

Shade.v1.png

My thoughts:

1. Need to actually put thought into lay out of the obstacles
2. Need more interesting obstacles, and at angles
3. Might want to try to get an isometric perspective (oh no!)
4. What else are we tracking besides # of mushrooms collected?
5. Clearly making a person/backup is beyond my artistic ability
6. I think the various mushrooms turned out pretty good
7. How should we represent the game’s boundaries? The solid border is a little difficult to notice.

On to round two.

Shade.v2.png

1. First off, can we even support this isometric view? I think it would make things look a lot better.
2. I added fences, they provide streches of shadow and I think will improve the experience.
3. I have lots of perspective issues here…
4. I like the person more, but still sucks. He legs or something.
5. This is starting to look like a fun game! Still need to think more about how the shadows are going to move. Will this level be fun left-to-right?
6. The colors are slightly washed out, this is true with both mock ups. Something is getting lost from Photoshop to PNG. Actually, if you download the file and view it in something besides FF it will look better.
7. The fences’ shadows look cool! We should have more cool shadows…

Alright, since I don’t think we will be able to implement something like the second mock up without going 3d (which scares me) I’ve continued to work on things. This time the game is strictly top down, which should help make things slightly simpler. The shadows are accomplished by either projecting two sides (as with the squares) or by projecting the shape and adding a rectangle (as with the circles). I’m not sure if this will be possible to do with code, but I thought it might be a way to start.

Shade.v3.png

1. At first I thought top down would suck compared to the last mock up
2. But after some time I actually think it looks pretty good, and could be fun, too
3. Obviously, being bird’s eye means some things can’t be done I reworked the basket to be a picnic.
4. I also reworked the mushrooms, they can certainly improve.
5. Not sure how to communicate which way the player is facing, maybe we need to add a backpack to the player…
6. Fences don’t look as cool :-( but I could spend some more time to make their shadows look cool again.