Hiya and happy Friday… most of you like shopping right??
I don’t know how many of you would have remembered Jess posting her Plinth models as part of an earlier dev post? In any case, I thought I’d share this week the latest on the progress done as I get round to animating for plinths/shopping.
As a recap, Plinths are what you need to showcase what you would like to buy and sell. Select a plinth to access the option to purchase what’s on display.
As you engage in shopping, I’ve created a long ambient ‘shopping and browsing’ animation loop so that the players can all see that you are immersed in browsing/shopping for worldly goods- (the anim is similar and in the same style to the long trading loop I posted in the trading animation post). The animation will also be shown next to the shopping gui cinematically similar to the camera work and menu on the inventory.
Shopping Animation
Long looping ambient animation, depicting and expressing something perhaps along the lines of…
‘Oh, that ‘amazing talisman of good fortune and invisibility’ (clearly) looks pretty nice… can I even afford it…perhaps…but do I really need it? Oh but it is rather tasty.’
Have a good weekend all
[SNEAKY POST EDIT FROM BEN] “Here’s the latest GUI mockup that it’ll run alongside”
Yeah until I get a view of Ben’s new gui (he’s working on that right now) and how the functionality is going to affects things, I don’t have a 100% idea of the finished look either. At least I do know at the very least the anim is mainly needed to visually show everyone else running around in-game in 3rd person when players are engaged in shopping or not. In any case, it’s all still work-in-progress and I’ll update when I can.
Talking of… check out my monitor. I usually test all my anims in-game to view consistency - here’s the lastest of anims done for the playable character since xmas.
Behold! My army of smurfs!
(ps. Ignore the floating plinth - we’re going to check the size, placing a final aesthetics later)
I think, going off from the menu at the moment, because it takes up too much space and it’s moving so it distracts me.
But as I said, I’d have to test it to see how it really feels^^
Interaction context: The camera change and animations are designed to provide some context to the player. Many of the GUI screens will look similar, so actually seeing what you’re doing should help reinforce what players are doing (and confirm they’ve interacted with what they expected).
Visual interest: Some of the most readable GUIs are simple, uncomplicated and relatively untextured IMHO. Problem is, this approach can look a bit plain and dull. Many games with full-screen GUI states end up overcompensating or overcomplicating their GUIs to make the screens look interesting. This is expensive and in many cases ends up hurting the overall user experience (looking at you, Skyrim skill tree…). Presenting as much of the beautiful in-game assets and anims alongside simple GUI helps keep the GUI functional and overall screen interesting to look at.
You get to see your character more often: We’re planning lots of character customisation and wearables but Boundless is a first person game. Any non-intrusive opportunity we have to show you the character is worth capturing, should help players feel like customisation is more rewarding.
Still able to react to world events: In un-pausable online games it’s important to see what’s going on around you when you’re in a menu state so you can react if a Cuttletrunk sneaks up on you and starts attacking.
Good points. I’m not against it per-se. I, for example, don’t mind it in the Minecraft inventory but something about the menu in Boundless is bothering me. But I wasn’t ingame for sometime so I’d have to go online and think about why for some time.
And depending on how you do it in the other screens it might not bother me or it might do. That’s why I said 60%^^
Love that you put so much emphasis on detail that you animate every little action.
And I love it even more that you are going to stick to the current camera + inventory arrangement.
@gerryjacobs - Loving the animation - will be very easy to tell from that just what you’re doing! You always manage to convey a lot of emotion in your animations, they always make me go “wow, excellent!”
@ben is that the plinth GUI? If so, it looks like the plinths will be able to hold more than one item now… or is it simply one item ‘type’. so for example, just “Stone Block”, but it can hold all the colour variations? That’s pretty cool! I’m loving how all this is shaping up!
Thank you very much for the kind words Stretchious and to everyone from the community who contribute and inspire us also. (Nice edit Ben!) It’s ‘Beer Friday’ in the studio and the mood in development is good and feeling inspired (we all passed a recent Milestone this week too - the coders especially were awesome). Thanks for the kind comments.
