It’s lonely being the cutest robot at the mall
I’ve started work on a five-day challenge: the Super-Deformed User Interface! Over the course of this week I will attempt to create a new, attractive, functional interface for GH2 using big-headed 2D graphics. Why would I do such a crazy thing? I didn’t ask why when I created Dungeon Monkey and I don’t intend to start asking why now.
Seriously, though, it’s an experiment. I haven’t put as much effort into the appearance of GH2 as I have into the other aspects of the game (there’s a rant over at Ataraxia Theatre about that; warning: swears and cartoon panties). I haven’t even put as much thought into it as I should have. The 3D interface as it currently exists is practical but ugly. Even worse, adding new content for it is no fun at all. The SDUI is meant to be pretty and fun; with practicality ranking a distant third.
As you can see in the above picture, today I got the map renderer and some graphics done. In addition to the SD buru-buru I also have a sprite for male citizens. Way back in the distant past I used to make sprites all the time. Both the buru-buru and the citizen have fidget animations; neither of them are very good because I’m apparently out of practice. I expect that once people see the citizen, the first question they’ll ask is “what is he doing?”, to which I’ll answer “he’s fidgeting”.
Please leave your comments and suggestions about the GH2 user interface below. Later on, I’ll tell you about my dream GH2 interface, if money and talent were no object.
EDIT- Here are the graphics files so far, in case you want to play around with them yourself: terrain, buru buru, male citizen.
December 30th, 2008 at 5:00 am
The statistics and description of equipment are also a player’s window into a game. What would Fallout be without brilliant writing?
Polish is nice, though, and I’m not complaining.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Looking good, keep on it!
December 30th, 2008 at 9:12 am
I’ve always wanted some way to see how much weight I’m carrying, and the maximum weight that I can carry without becoming encumbered. Is GearHead lacking this, or am I just not seeing it?
December 30th, 2008 at 9:55 am
what is the graphics format for this sprite? i want to try some…
December 30th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Daemonward- You’re right, that information is missing. Michael Deutschmann has submitted a patch which adds this info to GH1, and it’ll be included in the next release. I should add something similar to GH2 as well.
Phil Munoz- The character sprite is made of two cels, and each cel is 50×120 pixels. I’ve uploaded the graphics so far and placed links in the article above.
December 30th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
This looks beautiful. The 3d look was uglier, but more importantly it was SLOW. This system looks so much nicer.
December 30th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
I tried making an GearHead interface a while ago. The source files can be found on my webpage:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Quadrant/3864/gearhead.htm
December 30th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
This system should run faster on many computers, which is a Good Thing.
It’s pretty easy to write a new front-end for GH2, so if anyone wanted to do it they could take the code I’m writing now and quickly put together an isometric interface using GH1 tiles.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:15 am
Er, by “User Interface” do you mean the same user interface I am talking about? The buttons and menus and stuff? Something else? I’m confused…
December 31st, 2008 at 1:27 am
By “frontend” I mean the renderer, the bit which takes the internal game data and shows that to the user. In concrete terms I mean the four units Xgfx, Xmap, Xinfo and Xmenus.
If you know Pascal and are at least a bit familiar with the game it should be very very easy to create new versions of these units (or even just one or two of these units) and plug them in without changing anything else. Adding buttons and changing deeper parts of the interface might take either more or less work depending on what it is that you’re hoping to accomplish.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I like the user interface as is, maybe with a couple changes, such as mouse-over interactions (i.e. attack by clicking on, extended list of actions by right clicking).
I like the 2d look. Then again, I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.
December 31st, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Joseph Hewitt- Does that mean that there will be another release of GH1?
December 31st, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Erathoniel- I should definitely improve the mouse support. Many of the parts are there, they just need to be tied together.
Daemonward- Yes, there will be another release of GH1 soon. I should have released it already, but I didn’t want it to go out until I had added some new content. I’ll make that my project for next week.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Joseph Hewitt- What changes will there be? I think the GH2 SDL graphics for the Chimentero could go in, and maybe you could have the Rig-03a Gladius use the Savin graphics(since it is a modified Savin). Overall, it seems like there are a lot of mecha using the default BuruBuru graphics.
January 1st, 2009 at 3:37 am
Personally, I hoope that the next GH version adds some features from GH2 like the ammunition calibers.
January 1st, 2009 at 8:33 am
Are those real reflections I spy in the screenshot above? If so, awesome!