Most of the work this week has been around improving usability and user experience based on all the feedback we got from you in the recent weeks.

Community

We started a Wikia for Crest to make it easier to understand all the systems in Crest and in the future we'll eventually integrate it into the game itself. It's bare bones right now but we're continuously adding text and would appreciate your help in making it look more pleasing: Crest Wikia This week we also managed to go viral on imgur and made it to the frontpage with the following gif. We accidentally applied a shader that mixes vertex colours and diffuse to a model without UV coordinates. The shader chose to mix the colours with the camera instead et voilà: "Crest - Other Dimensions" was born:

Art

Martin This week has been eventful, I've redesigned the faith interface as you can see below. We didn't think it reflected clearly enough why you get influence. So we've streamlined the feedback and in the process removed the upper influence limit. Instead you get an allowance calculated from how many followers are happy or dissatisfied with you. This was how it worked generally before, but was more obtuse and confusing. Hopefully you'll like this better!
Emma This week I've been working on new UI and rework of the current UI. The Faith System is being changed slightly, which affects both the UI for Influence and adds a new tab of Faith. The layout of the Diplomacy tab was also changed, to provide more visibility for each city. With this, it'll be much easier to keep track of how your followers feel about you and how the cities feel about each other!

Code

Johannes Some more tweaking was done on the loading screen, and it is now done in our internal build. The experience of starting the game is roughly 1.2 million times better now. I've now started doing some research related to making the islands a bit more varied. Tomas I have implemented a new city symbol, based on the Acacia trees and shrubs. I have polished up the monuments feature and added monument ruins using Jens’ glorious remnant system. Also, I have changed cannibalism so that followers no longer eat each other immediately. Instead, they build up a motivation to do so over time before actually doing it. This should give the player a chance to intervene before cannibalism happens... if they want to intervene of course. :)
Jens This week has been split into two major tasks. I have been working with our audio designer, iterating through new sound effects that are going into the game later and I have also finished the new Builder follower, adding all the behaviour it needs. Most of the UI for the expertise buildings is now working, though it will need more iterations later since I used some placeholder items for now. Next step will be to get a floating feedback for when the followers spend resources.
Johannes W This week I've done a lot of refactoring and adjustments for the in-game underworld. The new game-over screen we are working on includes the chronicler showing the history events spiral. To this point, the underworld scene was coupled to the main world scene in way that it was impossible to use the same assets and scripts for the game-over screen. It has now become more modular, but there is still some more work left to do. I also started to work on generating unique stories when a game has ended, just to take a little break from the previous task. Emelie wrote different combinations of sentences and words depending on what happened in the game. It should be implemented in our internal build next week, at least.

Design

Emelie I have finally started work on the tutorial. I have spent time pondering on what is vital for the player to know at the very beginning and focused on those. Many messages were cut and the ones left will need to be reworded. After I’d decided on what to keep in the basic tutorial, with help from the team, I made a flowchart for everyone to see. Now I am reworking the messages that will guide the player through our tutorial, wish me luck!

Production

Marcus This week I have been busy with getting to know the project better and doing Producer stuff, such as planning, providing feedback and generally helping out where possible, both for the project and for the company as a whole. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!

[ 2017-10-13 13:54:06 CET ] [ Original post ]