New exterior building sprites for the Union, and some new groundcover varieties
I've made a few observations and discoveries since writing the last post. The first, seems to be that I'm stuck on a "scope see-saw". You hear a lot about scope creep - where as the project goes you keep thinking about new things you could squeeze in and before long your project is way over scope and impossible to complete - which is a real problem, but I've been having a new problem where I recognise myself scope creeping, counter by cutting down massively on scope, and start creeping all over again. Hence the see saw metaphor... I started this project with a very simple gameplay idea which slowly grew into something much more complicated, before I cut it all back to a much simpler idea. Only to start thinking of new things to add once again...
In the interests of preserving some of the ideas I've had that I will most likely abandon for scope creep here's a short list of some of the tangents I've taken the gameplay concepts:
- A survival concept where the player character has to manage their various survival stats like hunger or sleep, and this provides the impetus to join one of the factions and gives the player something to do (this was suggested by a good friend)
- A complex series of player choices all over a large free to roam world that interlock and affect each other. Such as blocking a drainpipe that might cause somewhere else to flood.
- Playing with 3D/2D by having the 2D world "expand" into a 3D world at some point in the game. This could be a fun metaphor for something like Plato's Cave, with the game presentation suddenly and unexpectedly becoming much richer. Alas it would require a massive amount of work to redo most of the game's art in 3D.
Until I manage to finally lock down how my game is actually supposed to play, I don't think I'm going to be able to get off the scope see saw. It frustrates me not yet having that sorted out, and I feel almost like complaining about the story guy on the project for slowing down the art and programming, before I remember that I am the story guy ;_;
I'll talk a little more about my sprites now to take my mind off that again. I spent a lot more time than I expected during this sprite cycle redoing what I was working as I was doing it. I found I would draw something, place it on my demo scene, move on to something else, and then come back and tweak the lines and colours of the first things I drew for a while. Of all the new sprites I've drawn, I would have substantially redrawn about 70% of them. Here's a comparison shot of a small section of the above photo as I was working on it:
Note the small changes to e.g. the lightglobe or chimney
A lot of these changes were to increase or reduce the contrast of certain sprites relative to other ones. In the above one of the most obvious changes was the dimming of the ceramic tile texture from white to beige. I might end up undoing this change. It seemed to make the building easier on the eye and more harmonious, but when I showed this building to some new people that had never seen them before, they had no idea what the tiles were. They guessed they were small windows or bricks! The brighter white texture was clearer, I think.
In terms of sprites I want to try drawing either some of the industrial textures for the Union wastelands, or instead jump back into unity and try to make some simple particles for things like butterflies or smoke from the chimneys. While I could do these with animated sprites (and indeed I will include some animated sprites for things such as ventilation fans or television screens), I would prefer to do them with particles where possible. Particles will allow me to add a lot of variation programmatically instead of through countless sprite variations, which will greatly ease my sprite workload. I enjoy drawing the sprites, but I can't spend all my time doing it!
So next on the agenda is more sprites, unless I get a brainwave and manage to clear up the gameplay/story mystery.
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