Arbiter - Monthly Recap - September 2023

Howdy Gamers!

I spent the first week or so finishing up some UI stuff before moving back to my arch-nemesis: level design. There's always a bit of an adjustment period when hopping between programming and art production, but environmental art has always been a particular pain point as it's simply something I don't have a lot of experience in. I've kinda dipped my toes in it here and there over the years, but this is the first year I've sat down and really tried to figure it all out. As it turns out, it's quite difficult!

Level Design (NEW)

Most of what I've been working on lately is asset production and art style studies/experiments. After my little UI detour I came back to the level I was working on and I just did not like it at all. The colours felt wrong, the shapes felt wrong, and in general I really felt like the theme was being 'lost in the woods' so to speak (it's a forest level). I've since tried to really distill the themes, palette, and overall vibe I'm going for with the level, and if nothing else, it's definitely looking better. I do kinda feel like I'm at the point where I just need to make assets to flesh out the space though, so that's where I'm at right now. 

I've never really had to learn proper art theory or fundamentals before so a lot of my time has been spent studying, practicing, and applying lessons learned to the game. It's been a slow as hell process, so apologies if I'm not posting as many progress pics while I figure it all out, but I want to be able to show the game off confidently and without pressure. That said, looking over my progress this year has been at least somewhat inspiring as I can definitely see some consistent improvement. I'm still not expecting to come out of this with like Genshin-tier environments or anything, but I do genuinely feel like I'm getting closer to something good, and that feels nice!

Ability Menu (NEW)

The UI however has been going quite well! I finished up most of the Ability Menu without much hassle, so I feel pretty confident about things on that front. There's still some iterating I wanna do, but I'll prolly hold off until the first level's done and I'm ready to start working on other elements like the mini-map and whatnot. 

*Cool ability names/icons coming soon ™

The main thing I worked on here was the ability list menu. You can now select an ability slot, go through a list of currently unlocked abilities, and equip one to either phase. In the ability list you can see the currently equipped ability highlighted in orange, as well as a small Arbiter icon indicating which abilities are equipped to each phase. I'm trying to make the phase system as intuitive as possible, so hopefully little things like that keep it easy to understand. I also just polished a lot of the effects/transitions and added some QoL for stuff like unequipping abilities with a single input and showing some unique text for newly unlocked abilities.

I'm pretty happy with the menu overall, but I'll likely be iterating on some of the layouts, shapes, and fonts in the future. In terms of how fast and fluent it is to swap out abilities though, I think it feels pretty good! I've mentioned it before but I really hate slow menus, so keeping things quick and intuitive has been my top priority, but now that everything's functional, I can work on honing in the visuals to make sure it's all nice and cohesive (after vanquishing my nemesis, of course).

And that's it for this month! I'm sorry I'm not quite ready to show off more of the levels yet, but I appreciate everyone's patience in the meantime. Learning is a process but I'm definitely mentally ready to really start figuring out this level design shit. I just want to get to a point where the art style is consistently good and I can pump out assets at a reasonable pace. Then I can just focus on making the levels and less on how to make them pretty. It's frustrating, but I really do think I can get there in time. 

And as always, thank you everyone for your support!

Cheers,
Jordy