After reworking the Shop Menu and the Character Selection screens I told myself, “No more big systems for a while…”

So naturally, I’m working on another big system.

This time I am reworking the player HUD (Heads-Up Display, for those unaware) that tells the players what is going on with their ships.

Reworked Player HUD

At a glance, it looks pretty similar to the older version aside from the slanted edge. Indeed, not much more info has been added to the HUD… at least at first glance. While it now has that stylish slant it also has the ability to use animations.

So far, I’ve created an intro animation. This will play at the start of a level, when a new player joins, or when you come from the pause or continue screen.

This, as you might imagine, is super slick when multiple players are in the game. Right now, I’m still working on the other HUD states. For instance, the HUD needs to shrink when unused.

Here’s another feature I’ve added:

The health now changes color as you get damaged. The health even begins to flash as you are near death! This is useful for reading health from your peripheral vision. When you’re busy dodging, it’s tough to take a moment and check your health. Now, you don’t have to.

In fact, this feature was suggested by the community. We are always listening to you guys and really do value your opinions and suggestions. Feel free to drop us a line in the comments below or on our various social media channels (Facebook and Twitter).

Firestarter

While I was working the new HUD, Lane got busy making new parts.

The first part, the Firestarter, turns you into a devastating long-range turret. As long as you fire the gadget, you’ll launch explosive fireballs in whichever direction you choose. The longer you use the Firestarter, the faster it will shoot. This comes with a price, however: while shooting, you’re slowed to a near-standstill.

The design goal of the Firestarter is to turn a player into an objective the team must protect. It dishes out unparalleled damage, but its immobile user can be torn apart in seconds by enemy fire. Before, we’d built parts that allow players to tank. Now, we’re making parts that reward tanking.

Teleporter

The second part is called the Teleporter. It… pretty much does what the name suggests. It lets you warp around the battlefield really fast. Or, if you hold it down for a moment, it lets you power up for bigger warps, letting you pull off some pretty impressive defensive tricks.

The goal here is to provide a fun way to boost movement speed without making characters harder to control. In this phase of design, we’re adding several enemies with zone-control attacks and exploitable weak points. As we continue, movement gets more and more valuable. We also wanted a defensive option that doesn’t require fine control of the analog stick. Lastly, teleportation is just plain fun.

Lots of new things being added to the game! Please leave us a message as we do read, listen and respond!

As I stated in an earlier post, the shop menu has been a huge problem for players. It was too complicated. Figuring out the function and relative power of each part was a nightmare. Since then… we’ve made a lot of progress.

Animating the Shop Menu

One of the problems of the old shop was that there really wasn’t a great way to animate it because of the way that I made it. To rectify that issue I moved the new shop over to our updated menu system that the other menus use. This system allows us to make really cool animations between menus. Recently on Twitter, I tweeted a preview of the new menus animations; here are all of the new animations in action.

The more I do animations, the more and more I enjoy it. But these animations aren’t the only things that are new in this version of the shop. There are now some handy things that make it easier for you to tell what each part does. We also (finally) included a purchase confirmation box, which should prevent the bulk of the user error we were seeing in the shop.

There are still some things that need to be added, like changing the color of the cost on the small buttons.

Providing More Info

To improve readability in the shop, we added two functions: “More Info” and  “Preview”.

More Info is similar to how the old shop was, where it shows you a description of what exactly that part does. Crucially, this information now only appears when you hit the “More Info” button. Before, this information was always present, leading to mind-boggling information overload (even for Fingeance veterans).

Preview, meanwhile, is an even bigger improvement. Players can now test out a part or try out their current loadout before they buy something. Even with our More Info panel, there’s only so much info that can be presented in text. Details like firing arc, firing rate, bullet range, and bullet speed are better shown than told.

We are still working a few more functions into the shop, but we hope to be done with it very soon.

Bigger Buffs

Besides the new shop, we also have been working on getting everything to work well. That includes adding in some new buffs. One of those buffs is to literally make you buff; it makes you a bigger sized ship. You may be wondering “Why on earth would I want to be bigger?” This kind of buff is for those that want to protect their team, helping players fill out their roles.

Animations are so nice. Boy, and I thought just lighting added a lot.

Things in Fingeance are really shaping up nicely. Thanks everyone for your feedback and input, we have added so much because of it. The last few days before our last major update we have been bug fixes and updateing. But I was finally able to move back to the art side of the game and work on making some animations for various things in the game, particularly menus.

Now this isn’t “frame-by-frame” animation, I haven’t worked on that (yet). This is key frame animation, where basically I create points in an animation and the computer fills in the gaps. For example if there was a character who I wanted to raise their hands, instead of drawing every frame of the character raising their hand I would make key frames (hence the name), like the hands by their side and their hands actually raised. The computer would fill in the gaps. I have had so much fun working on them.

The Little Things Matter

The entire time I was working all of the animations I had that in mind “The little things matter…” the things that no one consciously thinks about when viewing animations. Now, I am no animator, I haven’t really done much animation in the past but it has always interested me. I have in the past done some animation work for other games, but my greatest endeavor in it was in a PS1 game called Fighter Maker (which isn’t easy still). So I dove right in. Rather than talk about each thing that I changed, why not just show you (GIFs incoming!):

Animations Add Polish

So I won’t talk about the animation for too long, but I just wanted to mention a few things I am really proud of.

Pause Menu

The pause menu originally looked basically the way that I wanted it. In the end I really like how well it turned out with how the menu slides in and it seems like it would naturally do that.

Continue

The continue screen is probably the animation that I am most proud of. The old menu doesn’t hold a candle to the way the new one looks. Not only that but there is an option to leave the game in the new one.

Old Continue Menu

So there are the new menu animations that I added in the latest demo release. What do you think about them? You can check them out in context by going to the Fingeance landing page and trying out the demo.

Recently, I have been working on reworking how the menu system works in the game (yeah, I also code as well). So I thought I would take the opportunity to show what the menu actually looks like in its current iteration.

  The splash screen has a simple animation where the all the characters slide in to the frame. To be honest… this one was rushed. It was to meet the deadline for GlitchCon and we wanted to have something visually appealing for the players to see before they went in the game. I wanted to make a custom image that I would then animate… but we ran out of time.

The main menu on the other hand wasn’t rushed. I was able to design the menu and the animation a lot closer to what I wanted. I wanted to have cool splash art on the side of the menu to add more visual interest, but for now I just left the characters.

The last major menu that I worked on (for the main menu) is the character select screen. This is probably the one that is the closest to what I had envisioned in my head. I liked the idea of seeing the characters in huge portrait vs a grid of them like and Super Smash Bros. Though, I really don’t like the animation for this one; it may be simple but I just don’t like it that much.

Alright, that is all of the menus that I want to talk about in this post. Of course these aren’t final menu designs but it does help give an idea of how the game should look. What do you think? Let us know by leaving a comment!