EL COMPLETO!

As you can tell from the title I never was very good at Spanish lol, but I've now totally finished everything for this project. As you can see the blogs got a bit slack nearer the end, and well, so did the work if I'm to be honest. I just fell in love with the unreal engine and I put 90% effort into learning that which did'nt leave much for the rest of my project. That should'nt matter though because when I want to leave uni I wanna be a level designer, not a User Interface Artist or a early 1920 Russian revolution film expert (I could rant on about that for days, but thats for another blog).

I didn't really do many sketches, and the ones I have done have pretty much been ruined as their literally rough sketches, little drawings here and there when I had a few minutes. Got a sketch pad and tried drawing some sketches and ideas in the car, but have you ever tried drawing/writing in a moving car, not an easy task! Especially in winter when your freezing and you can't move your hand.

Overall I'd say I'm pretty pleased with this project. I'm happier with the acctual menus, and the mechanics behind them rather then the in game HUD's. I really could of handed this in early Decemeber and I would have been just as pleased with it.

I'm really looking forward to next term, and hoping we do more with with unreal. I still like flash, quite a lot in fact, but I really have fallen head over heals for unreal lol!

Been a while...

Like the title says, its been a while since my last post, this is mainly because I've fallen in love with UT3 and its taken all my time up. As well as the fact that I have to spend some time working on my contextual practice, which drives me nuts.

I've added video to my GUI now showing what the game will look like, taken from TF2 because it works similar to my game. I probably spent longer on the video then I should have, but I got carried away trying to link the music to the sound-track. I'm quite pleased with the result, but like I said it was probably a waste of time.

I want to change the actual hud a bit more, as I don't really like the look of it at the moment, and the map sticks out like a sore thumb. I've edited the wording to make it suit the age range and the game style.

New weapon selection screen

Finally got a system that I like. Had a few problems with getting the stats system working, I've had a few other ideas on how to get it to work, although not the way I had planned.
Although I like the weapon select system I might change the look of it because it doesn't look as good as I want just yet.

Help is on the way!

I'm still a bit stuck on how I should design my weapon selection screen for my game. But I've added in a feature to help people get around my game if they do find it a bit confusing. On the main page theres a "live" and "test" button, Live will play normally whilst Test (probably change the name) will Bring up speech bubbles when you roll over certain things. This should help the user understand things if they are confusing. I'll probably end up adding a button which will let you turn the bubble on and off as at the moment you can only do it on the home screen.

I need to do some more on my design document now, and also get some user testing done to see if I'm going in the right direction. I've already spoke to everyone in class about what they think, and they like it, but think the weapons selection screen is confusing. I'll upload it to the uni forum and ask for feedback in a few days.

Menus

Ive pretty much finished my menu's now. I went back and made all the menu's interactive so you can now see what they will be like in game. I've started making some images of the ingame screens so I can add the game GUI.

Been a while!

It's been nearly a month since I've updated this blog so let me fill you in.

I'm currently creating a GUI for a game that I have decided to make up. I could of gone for the easier route of choosing a game already out there, but I wanted to see if I can make one from scratch. The hard part really is the fact I have no images of the game, I have to make up the game play, settings, story etc to really get a GUI that fits the game's style. But to be honest I'm enjoying it.

I originally was going to go for a horror type of game, but when I started the project I decided to go for a comedy FPS that's done in a cartoon style, similar to Team Fortress. Also by doing this I can create some images that the game might look like in cinema 4D because I have the "sketch and toon" module which creates good Cel Shaded images/animations.

So far I have my user analysis complete, comparisons to other games that are like mine and I've also done some sketches. As well as that I have made the main menu screens in photoshop and then transferred them over to flash. It currently works how I want it too I'm just wondering what music to go with it (Yeah I music's not technically GUI, but why not put the extra effort in). This weekend I'll probably start on the actual game GUI which includes the HUD and map system.

Designing for the user - 2

I've now chosen all of my ideas and finished my presentation. I'm going to be presenting it in flash which will help me integrate video into my presentation better. I'm not going to revel my every day object yet :P