Proper Devlog #6

Well, without any particular reason, like a hypothetical beta of some unknown game … 

khm, anyway...

It’s been quite a while. So, there should be some things to talk about? Right? Or left? 

What an interesting dilemma, that absolutely coincidentally reminds me about one element that I am trying to incorporate into the game. 

Leading a player, misleading a developer/

(Spoilers) The idea is to replace prices of abilities with charges that can be received from placing tiles on some places on the map. While the quality and necessity of this concept is a separate question, I would like to focus your attention on the concurrent task of conveying information to the player. More specifically, how to show that it’s desirable to choose one exact spot instead of any other.

          Some kind of effect on the board is a natural idea. Expecting that the amount of such effects would grow over time, they shouldn’t be irritating, especially in the form of some cluster. Here I had two variants: to create a static picture or fully colour tile like we already do to indicate other things(an old joke about creating a rainbow is starting to be a lot more menacing), alternatively to use some small animated gif. 

Final goal of this contraption is for the player to place hex on our tile and originally I thought that the second approach is more suitable(probably because the first one could create a false idea of something already existing on the chosen tile).

I tried some particles and found this gif

          With blue and yellow sparkles that conveniently correspond to existing abilities in the game it seemed like the perfect option. Though it was compressed into smaller size just to fit into existing tiles and partly lost its noticeable duality of colour. The result looks like this:

There are like 4 effects on this picture(I am still not sure myself). At the time I was satisfied, because it wasn’t disturbing. 

          And then I showed the whole feature to a team member. His review can be summarised as “make the indication more noticeable, colour the tile or smth”. The very thing that I tried to escape now caught up to me from the other side of development. Back to initial dilemma (and playing beta) I guess.