It’s Friday yet again, seems like it happens every week! Here’s another report from the development trenches. Since we are still very much in battle focus a lot of tasks have been kind of similar to the week before this. But fear not beloved reader. I have finally been able to get our UI designer to tell us a bit more about what he is working on. So, less dev talk and more UI-talk this week.
But let’s start with the programmers. Niklas has been working on refactoring the spell system in battle to make it work with the new UI. He’s been working closely with David to tie everything together. There’s still quite a bit left, but progressing steadily! David, on the other hand, has been refactoring code for the battle effects to be able to work with different types of spell targeting.
We got a lot of praise for the lavaborn concept art. Here is our pixel version ready for ingame action!
If we talk to the artists we have had some interesting progress with the redesign of units and more assets for the battle screen. Anders has been focusing on new animations for our redesigned squire troop along with a freelancer called José. He has also produced battle scene assets and worked closely with Kordian on the troops. Kordian has been modifying the Donerian Hellbreath character to our new design guidelines. He has also worked on two new characters, the Lavaborn and a necromancer.
Before and after re-design, the Hellbreath is a high tier unit for Doneria. It has recently undergone our visual overhaul process. Notice how the smoke disappeared from the torch. It’ll be implemented with a shader instead of old school hand drawn pixels. Pretty neat!
Now, regarding the UI! Just as the rest of the team Christian has been focusing on Battle for the last few weeks. Battle presents additional and different challenges for the user interface compared to Adventure. So we have had to test our theories for the visual language, iterate and update – and bring this to the rest of the game.
Songs of Conquest is a classic adventure game and we want you to feel that you are in control of your Wielders and in command of your troops. The purpose of the user interface is to support that and at the same time let the player focus on the beautiful and compelling art in the game world. We strive for a robust and tactile interface, that at the same time focuses on the most important aspects of the game. The job of the user interface is to support the gameplay and guide the player experience – and we feel that in a strategy game, the visual and interactive “marriage“ of the user interface and the rest of the game world is extra important.
We have tried many different textures and shapes for the unit queue UI elements. Do you think we are on the right path?
Our user interface has changed with the art and art style of the game. We started with a pixel styled user interface, with pixel fonts to display all lore and data. When we reworked and updated the art style to 2.5D we also took a big leap in the user interface to introduce “non-pixel” art and fonts in glorious 4K. The visual language and style of the game just got a whole new range of tools to be able to express its tone. For a visual designer, this is not always a blessing but you need to set up your own restrictions so that the result will be as concentrated and clear as possible. And in our case, we also now have a non-pixel layer over a striking and distinct pixel art style – and sometimes those layers need to interact.
Finally, if you missed our trip down memory lane earlier this week, check out this work in progress screenshots. It paints a very telling story about just how much the game has changed over the years!
Please note that this is a devblog. Features and graphics mentioned or displayed above may or may not change during the development process.