Menu / Controls / Tutorial Level / Preloader

The following are screenshots of a couple of things I've added to the game.


Menu Screen - I added a more appealing background than just black, plus the animation for the title has been fixed. Also, I've added some navigational aids.


Options Screen / Controls - The controls for the 360 controller (made it in Illustrator), hmm I should put the keyboard controls in as well, not everyone will get to play it with a 360 controller, plus, its only a demo on how it would play on the 360, being designed for it and all.


In-Game Tutorials - They are instructional aids in-game on what controls the player needs to press to jump, attack, open item boxes etc.




Preloader - This preloader is used before each level opens.

DH Menu

...the menu interface with the logo. I will probabily redo this because I've had some user feedback on it and there were a few problems of the title being unclear such as the glow on the title makes it harder to read, the animation embedding into the title is too slow and there is no visual feedback when hovering over the start and options button. These will be sorted when I have the other higher priority things out of the way. I had a thought of sutley placing a much clearer version of the title inside of the background in the first level, where letters would appear in and amongst the parallaxing trees.

Menu Interface Designs & HUD redesign

...I've been designing the menu interface, and experimenting with some cool gradient shading in Flash. These are some of the different variations I was thinking on using, but I've chosen to use the interface design uderneath the start game and options text. I have also redesigned the in-game interface because I was having some problems with it (see previous post), but now I think it works well within the levels (urh, except from geting lost in the 2nd level, argh).



This is a sample of the orb collection and inventory interface. The orb collection presents the new feedback of upgraded abilities. As for my initial design of the inventory was going to be include as a seperate interface outside of the game, but this would break up the flow, so I changed it to an in-game inventory interface. The HUD presents these new abilities by extending its link to include another guage. Each link added to the orginal guage increases the level and power of a special ability, but this special requires more orbs to execute on harder enemies.
The inventory can be selected by holding down the left trigger on the 360 controller and items inside the inventory can be scrolled by using the dirctional keys while holding down the left trigger and pressing A to use the item.

HUD - Progress

Hey... this is what the interface looks like in game, but im still not 100% satisfied with it yet, there are some problems with its clarity and it not standing out from the background, anyways it was suppose to look like a dreamcatcher thing but it evolved into a cog thing instead. The small squeares are the visual feedback for the orb collection, the colour of the orb in the interface gets stronger until it is placed in the front of the cube, this means that the power-up is ready to deploy (again, this might be hard to see, so I might go back to the progression of a circle shaped visual feedback for the orb collection that gradually fills up the gauge), I also think that the circular interface breaks apart from the background so that it is easier to see by the player, but the colour needs to change because it merges into the dark areas of the background.