Hello to you all once again, it's been a while since the last blog post, but am back now and open to showing some working bits I've been setting up for since the last time.
A majority of the work is concept work, but for something to get in-game use, I've attempted to remake the city background for Prisma's Outskirts.
The old one looked like this, minus the right spotlight being in the way there a bit.
Working on revamping it at the moment to keep a city feel and being on the other end of a rocky area just on the outside of the main city. Although, I might make the lights/windows of the back row of buildings much darker to not blend as much, and maybe add more window variants to make em not too.. repetitive.
The idea is to keep the middle bright and showy, with a strong contrasting dark on both above and below, where the sky has the stars and even it's got a lightening gradient for an effect of light pollution, even to make the most of the stars visible where it's darkest and fade out closer to the city, and the bottom has increasingly bluer/more visible stones.
Moon placement isn't finalized either.
Alongside that, a majority of work being done is more conceptual work, but for outside level based items and events, things like planning the HUDs for Maps, End/Start of level screens, likewise.
Starting with showing this through the Map HUD, this work is for stylistic designs.
The map hud also has a lot of plotting alongside it, text effects and color, coin progress, how it can work visually when idle or moving, even possible events if I really got my game up and did coding faster/more efficiently.
To a lesser extent, there's also one for the end of level screen attempting this stylized approach
Games like Smash Ultimate, Persona, or even the recent JoJo's Bizarre Adventure game tries out this geometric approach to things, something I want to get down as well for Moof to have.
In this case, a strong sense of blues that match Moof, but isn't a light shade to blend in with him, sharp lines, smoothed circular curves, a distinct yellow text to pop out and matches his wrists and ankles.
There was even an attempt at doing this with a Bestiary/Gallery of sorts (granted character images wouldn't also be blue, I have a placeholder, same with a placeholder UI concept) though I'm not too sure I like the layout provided this attempt.
I'll see if I can do a better UI/theme if I do go through with this Gallery.
Maps, Menus/Options, and Special Screens like the ends of levels, I want it around a few good areas, but not too spread out to make it feel less special,
I want to balance the stylistic geometric approach to be seen as the "outside" force, something the characters don't seem to see but we as players do, like non-diegetic music (music characters can not hear) but in a visual form of the meaning, compared to the levels I'm making more atmospheric and scenic for the Moof to see and explore, like source music (the music characters CAN hear).
I am to believe this could be a balance I can achieve with enough tinkering around.
Heck, I theoretically could even have this theme be shown in different colors depending on world or where it's playing if I REALLY tried and could make it not weird in performance, but that might be too much effort for one person to do, I'd have to really process the thoughts there.
A lot of this is me planning though, I'll have to trial and error these all at some point, but while I'm here working on these, I'll keep trying my best to make something visually special and hopefully mechanically enjoyable.
So for now at least that'll be all from me for the time being, I'll update more as more happens.
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