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BiB v0.4.0 Retro
3 years ago
Heya everyone!
A little late, but happy new year! Hopefully everything is going well so far!
Kinda wanted to take a minute to do a small retrospective on the latest build of Bigger is Better (BiB). Couple of things really stuck with me through the development of v0.4.0.
UI Layout
This one goes without saying it, but UI is important. Not just player UI, but development tooling UI. During the past two(?) weeks on v0.4.0 I had to build out some rudimentary testing tools and let me tell you, they are a nightmare to look at. All my fields are just splatted on a dev page. Don't get me wrong, they are super useful! Infact with some of the recent issues with the mirror and the stores, I was able to quickly debug them using my dev tools and throw a fix together very quickly. However, there is some work to be done on it to make it look nicer and easier to use.
Battle UI got a major overhaul, instead of just text on a screen I opted in for more of a button layout/dual panel screen. Testing that out was a lot nicer to work with and really started to make me think about other areas of UX improvements around the game. At first I didn't know if the battle UI would work well enough, but as I played around with some pieces there were opportunities to use the UI to clarify some battle data. Color coding damage, misses, and keeping text in line with each other in the combat log seem to give a good way of describing the flow of combat.
Growth Scaling
Scaling everything dependent on growth is kind of a nightmare as well. Do you scale parts differently? How do you store size information? When a character gets larger in general, does everything? How do you describe how large assets are? Do you describe them in relation to the character or with the world?
The approach that was taken in BiB was to move assets over a percentage/ratio based measurement. In relation to the character how large are some of their assets? This way, I think, allows the player to visualize how large they are and gives the bonus of feeling like you are actually impacting the size of the character. I think if things were to be described in relation to the world, that might feel more defeating early on for smaller characters. Also with moving everything over to a ratio based measurement, scaling off of size allows the description of the character to stay mostly intact. Don't really have to put in edge cases for when a character is X size.
These were just some thoughts I had rolling around and wanted to put on "paper" during development. For the growth scaling, it's not something I really thought about when consuming creations and was surprised with how much time I spent thinking of the logistics of it lol.
Thanks again everyone and hopefully we'll see v0.5.0 in two weeks!
A little late, but happy new year! Hopefully everything is going well so far!
Kinda wanted to take a minute to do a small retrospective on the latest build of Bigger is Better (BiB). Couple of things really stuck with me through the development of v0.4.0.
UI Layout
This one goes without saying it, but UI is important. Not just player UI, but development tooling UI. During the past two(?) weeks on v0.4.0 I had to build out some rudimentary testing tools and let me tell you, they are a nightmare to look at. All my fields are just splatted on a dev page. Don't get me wrong, they are super useful! Infact with some of the recent issues with the mirror and the stores, I was able to quickly debug them using my dev tools and throw a fix together very quickly. However, there is some work to be done on it to make it look nicer and easier to use.
Battle UI got a major overhaul, instead of just text on a screen I opted in for more of a button layout/dual panel screen. Testing that out was a lot nicer to work with and really started to make me think about other areas of UX improvements around the game. At first I didn't know if the battle UI would work well enough, but as I played around with some pieces there were opportunities to use the UI to clarify some battle data. Color coding damage, misses, and keeping text in line with each other in the combat log seem to give a good way of describing the flow of combat.
Growth Scaling
Scaling everything dependent on growth is kind of a nightmare as well. Do you scale parts differently? How do you store size information? When a character gets larger in general, does everything? How do you describe how large assets are? Do you describe them in relation to the character or with the world?
The approach that was taken in BiB was to move assets over a percentage/ratio based measurement. In relation to the character how large are some of their assets? This way, I think, allows the player to visualize how large they are and gives the bonus of feeling like you are actually impacting the size of the character. I think if things were to be described in relation to the world, that might feel more defeating early on for smaller characters. Also with moving everything over to a ratio based measurement, scaling off of size allows the description of the character to stay mostly intact. Don't really have to put in edge cases for when a character is X size.
These were just some thoughts I had rolling around and wanted to put on "paper" during development. For the growth scaling, it's not something I really thought about when consuming creations and was surprised with how much time I spent thinking of the logistics of it lol.
Thanks again everyone and hopefully we'll see v0.5.0 in two weeks!
basically I suggest giving things. objects stats as well things like height, weight, volume?
I'm always up for ideas and if there is anything please DM me!