Welcome back Sparks!

These last 2 weeks have been awesome in regard to community responses! <3 The game is already starting to form this special identity with minimal work, and everyone seems quite excited to see more. I’m here to deliver!

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Resource Tiles

The basic tiles gave the foundation for the look of the world, but we need that “special sauce” - a reason for the player to explore. Given that these tiles will be interact-able, the use of additional colors to make them pop is key. Below are the initial drafts:

This is a teaser of sorts, but the generation of the world will be done in “rings.” Essentially, each ring going out from the center will be a certain biome. To give some consistency, each area will have similar types of tiles. For now, this is shaping up to be:

• 1 “cracked” tile
• 1 “dusty” tile
• 1 “vegetation” tile

These are very vague on purpose. I think it fits well with this first round of tiles though, so I’ll stick with it more in the future!

Time to mix it into the world generation:

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GUI Mockup

The GUI is crucial - it’s what the player will regularly interact with, and it sets a certain tone for the game. With this game, the land is supposed to be desolate and barren, so having a large amount of overlays will conflict with this vibe. I experimented a bit with no dedicated GUI that could just be toggled visible temporarily, but also found it to be too empty. When lighting is added in, most of the screen will be pitch-black, and with no GUI it almost feels like there’s no game at all.

The trick here is to find a balance. The main elements that need to be readily available are the echolocation dashboard, the player survival stats, and the hotbar. This means that:

• The player can scan their surroundings
• The player can track their health
• The player can interact with the world

Everything else can be toggled as needed, such as inventory and NPC profiles. With this established, I can begin mockup of the GUI assets! The programmer artist in me thrives for free assets, so rather than creating these massive items this time I turned to the inter-webs. What I discovered was this wonderful artist, and their Golden UI assets.

They have a consistent, minimal palette that gels nicely with the existing assets. Against the eventual black background it will stand out nicely too. Furthermore, they have this steampunk, robotic aesthetic that is well suited given the player is a robot. This was literally the perfect set of assets to come across! I also love the general-purpose elements of it like pipes and other shapes, meaning that I can stitch together some custom GUI elements with this pack as needed. Basically, please show this artist some love for their amazing work!

Here’s a few of those draft GUI elements:

And here’s how they look as overlaid in the editor view:

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What’s Next?

“That echolocation part sounded neat, can we see it?” Sure! Alongside adding some functionality there, I will start adding some new assets to build the central area. I must say I'm quite pleased with how the game is panning out already - just imagine how this will look a year from now!

As always, thank you for the ongoing support! It means a lot <3