Posts

Update 3: The Dialogue UI

Image
We've now come to the point where fixing up a proper UI is important. More than just functional, we now want our game-in-the-works to look presentable and starting thinking about how visual design feeds into the game's systems. This is not a small task, so we decided to break up the UI design into a few pieces that we could work on one at a time. The first piece, and probably the simplest, was the UI of the dialogue engine. This is what we came up with. Screenshot from an event with Shelly First, we wanted to place the text box at the bottom of the screen. That way, we could make use of the great width of the screen to display more text, and position the characters to have as much of them showing as possible without covering up any important features like the face. Next, we wanted to have a cohesive theme for our UI. We decided on a mainly thread-based UI, since one of the core components of Dark Miasma's lore is the existence of the Threads of Fate. We d...
Post a Comment
Read more

Update 2: Creating Cards

It's down to the wire. You've fought hard to get this far. The wolhound that's been terrorizing the town snarls at you, blood and spit flying from its teeth. You're both wounded, that much is clear. You just need one final blow... You draw your next card. Is it an attack card? A heal? A buff, poison, or spell? An attack will need to deal damage, buffs and poisons need to be applied to their targets. So how does one card differentiate itself from another? When you use that heal card to save yourself from the savage wolhound, how do you know it won't actually deal damage? Creating Cards A deck is composed of cards, and cards can be many different things in a card based RPG like Dark Miasma. Between damaging attacks, buffs, heals, card draw, and other properties, cards need to have a variety of functions and behaviours while still being, well, cards. Luckily, there are a number of ways to solve this issue. The Trivial Answer - Dangerous in the long...
Post a Comment
Read more

Update 1: C# Events and UI

Gold and Stress For the past few days I've been implementing gold and stress into Dark Miasma. Gold is, as you would expect, how much money you have and is used for buying and crafting cards, training your stats, and relieving stress. You become more stressed by working and fighting, and if you reach maximum stress, you will collapse and be out of commission for a week. Money and stress are two very large factors to consider when deciding how you want to spend your week in Galeport, so we want to display those values openly when you're choosing your activities.  The question now is: How does my display know how much stress I have, and how does my display know when my stress changes? How do does the UI know how much stress I have? This one's pretty simple. Since Dark Miasma is a single player game, I use a singleton to track my player. Being developed in Unity, the Player is currently a GameObject that triggers DoNotDestroyOnLoad, and the Player class keeps a stat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Welcome to the Dark Miasma dev blog!

Welcome!  Hey there! If you don't know who we are, we're Uncommon Potential Games, an indie game development studio developing our first game, Dark Miasma. Dark Miasma is a fantasy role playing game about saving the small town of Galeport from the Miasma, a darkness that sweeps through the lands, destroying all civilization it touches.  To save Galeport from this grave threat you must... well you can't, really. In three years' time, the Miasma will come, and Galeport will  be destroyed. But the townsfolk don't have to be destroyed with it. In the three years before the Miasma, you must gain the favour of the locals and convince them to follow you in a mad journey through treacherous lands, so that you may find refuge in the Capital. You'll have to choose how you spend your time wisely. Will you spend your limited time making friends? Working at the blacksmith to forge the strongest sword? Or will you delve into the wilderness, seeking to strengthen yo...
1 comment
Read more