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

Designing for the user - 1

So we've started a new project called designing for the user, where we have to examine the way a user uses something through an interface. As we're doing games we'll be looking at GUI (graphical user interface). Next week we have to bring in a presentation on a bad gui, a good gui and also an everyday object with a bad user interface.

For my good gui I've chosen TF2 and theres elements of that, that I want to introduce to my GUI that I make later on (Mainly the way that you have the option to have minimal GUI or the standard GUI). For my bad one, well it was a hard choice as every game should go through enough user testing to make sure its not a bad GUI, but in the end it was Generals and Gods, which I found by searching for the worst games I could.

I still haven't found my every day object...