Game
Dead Drift

2 years ago

NEW UI PLANNING!

Since the beginning of this project, I've done its UI in a somewhat haphazard way. Now it's time to get some things right, so I'm planning to fix some things about its user interface.

Read more in the article by clicking on...


So... let's start at where I'm at now. This gif shows Dead Drift's current UI:

ezgif-3-3424296080.gif

As you can see, there's a kill counter in the upper left corner, a speedometer-looking health bar in the bottom left, and a still-not-finished list of power-ups piling up on the upper right (that weird red rocket thing there).

This layout has some problems. Can you guess what they are?

  • The first one is that they use too much screen space. The Health Bar thing in particular (although it was truly fun drawing an animating it);

  • The second problem is that it uses too much space at the top and the bottom of the screen. Since the screen is wide, using these spaces make the screen look even wider... it makes the screen too "horizontal."

If we were to mark it in red, this is what it would look like:

image.png

This feels weird, and it even affects gameplay: players will be rewarded by driving left or right because since the game's camera shows more of these spaces, the player can react better to threats that come from those ways.

Thinking about this, I planned the following new UI for Dead Drift:

new_ui_project.png

Don't worry about the pixelated thing in the middle -- this is just a project I drew on ASEprite, I only added something in the middle as a reference.

I think it looks pretty self-explanatory, but I will go into detail nonetheless:

  • On the upper left, we have a numeric health counter. Below it, there's a danger message which will appear when the player has only one life left;

  • On the upper right, there's a numeric kill counter, which increases with every zombie that's killed. Below it, there's a bar, filling up as you get closer to leveling up (and gaining a new power-up).

I immediately see two advantages of this UI project:

  • It uses the sides of the screen better. Now the game even has a squarer aspect, and certain directions will be less favored;

  • It has a more "retro" looking feel to it.

And about the things I lose:

  • The speedometer thing was cute, but I don't mind "killing my darlings" at all, as they say;

  • The power-ups list...

The power-ups list was something that I almost included below the "next level" bar. They would go down all the way to the bottom of the screen... but then I thought...

What about the mobile players?

This is not a hard restriction, but I'd like to have this game running on mobile (Construct deploys for mobile platforms, so why not?). The bottom right and left corners of the screen will definitely be covered by the players' thumbs, so... better not to use them.

I guess I'll put this information on the Level Up Screen, and on the Pause Screen. It's not critical to know this at every second anyway, and most survivor games do this.

So, that's it! That was a long one!

You'll likely see these changes on the next gifs I post about Dead Drift!

See ya all tomorrow!

5
4
3
3
3
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1


19 comments

Loading...

Next up

Everybody talking about the Super Mario movie and here I am thinking how cool it would be if they made a movie out of THIS game...

HI! I'm getting close to hitting 1000 FOLLOWERS (woohooo!) and I'm thinking about doing some special things to celebrate this:

- A Fireside where we can play a drawing game together!

- A mini-game using the sock puppets!

What do you think of that?

Fixed some nasty bugs, changed the dynamic font to Eeve Somepx's great "Hungry" font, and few things more!

Now it's time to go to sleep! See ya tomorrow!

LGBTQ+ Game Dev Icons:

David Gaider is a dev who worked on Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and more! (He's also openly gay.)

As part of his work on KOTOR, he created the Sith Code!

HELLO EVERYONE! How are you doing this Monday?

Are you folks excited for this week? What are you planning to do?

I'd love to hear it in the comments!!!

Our newest Pride month quest has begun! 🏳️‍🌈 Celebrate with us by completing this quest!

Posting some other DEAD DRIFT EXPERIMENT GIFS. You can see "enemy trucks" (the dark rectangle thingies roving around) AND big zombies (they have 10x the HP of a regular zombie!!)

Some additional comments in the article!

#pixelart #gamedev #indiedev

Mission Complete! Yesterday I was thinking hard about Dead Drift and I had a game design breakthrough!

If you're interested in this kind of design stuff, click on [Read article] below...

#indiedev #gamedev

Which game from last week's Summer Game Fest are you most excited to play?

Tell us in the comments below!

(You can see all the games in the article)

MAKING YOUR CUSTOM BAR IN CONSTRUCT 3 - PART 1!

This is a simple tutorial about creating a custom bar using the native Progress Bar from Construct 3!

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, hop on and click on Read Article below! :)

#indiedev #gamedev