MMiaW: UI overlay

Here's the user interface. I'm still not 100% sure whether to show the player stats on top or bottom. The game can be played by 4 players, so maybe I can show two players up and two down, or something like that.

The red bar is health, the blue is mana, and the green one is Rage. The rage fills up when you hit enemies with melee weapons and when you get hit. When the rage bar is full, you can use a special melee attack which will depend on the weapon type (sword, axe, spear, hammer, club).

You can see the two weapon slots, but I plan to allow players to carry some items as well. Not sure where I will show those.

If you wonder what's that blue ball: the magic staff shoots magic orbs that resemble tears in The Binding of Isaac. This is the most basic projectile. Other wands will fire different ones. For example the Staff of Fire will shoot fireballs that set enemies on fire; the Staff of Ice will shoot ice bolts that freeze the enemies, etc.

The map

In the meantime I gave up on the smaller screen idea. 1366x768 sized rooms are too small for big 1920x1080 monitors. Although you can see multiple rooms at the same time, it would still mean that 40% of screen is unused. I tested and there's just too much empty black space on the screen. So, I decided to make the rooms wider. The room size is now 1920x720. Players with smaller screens will scroll left to right, just like Castle Crashers. There is no vertical scrolling. If you have more than 720p high screen you will be able to see more of the beautiful backgrounds that extend at the top of the screen.

Because the rooms are rather wide (or should I say: long?) now having a single entrance vertically doesn't work well. Because of this, I'm changing the maze layout to hexagonal rooms. Each room can have 6 different exits. The new maze generator already works, and here's the minimap:

This one shows small rooms and it's optimized for 720p screens (768px, 800px, etc.) If you have 900+ it starts showing a bigger minimap. Once I add all the different room types I will add markers for different rooms and perhaps if you left some important items somewhere. And there will be magic spells to discover the whole map.

The white rectangle is the current room, light ones were visited and dark ones you know about (have seen the door to it) but haven't been inside.

read more... Tweet to @bigosaur Bigosaur, 2016-03-07