The Devil's Broker

[StrawberrySmiles]

^ It's not that terrible, trust me. :P

 

[Perihelion]

Yeah, I wish the real sprites that go in this scene were done. I'm thinking I can probably get away with this, though. It's iffy, but it's probably better than using a CG for the whole scene, since it's pretty long.

 

[Xhukari]

I reckon it looks pretty good, personally! Have you considered how / where you UI will be? If you're that unhappy with certain aspects, perhaps you can angle it so that its hidden behind the UI.

 

[Perihelion]

Yep, the UI is in progress. I've hired someone, and we have the dialogue UI almost done, actually. I think it'll help a little bit to have UI on there, but the design we went with is fairly lightweight, so it won't cover up huge amounts of stuff.

 

[ZenVirZan]

I don't think it's so much of an issue with your background composition as it is the characters not interacting with the car. I think if the guy on the right had a frame with his arm forward holding the right side of the wheel, the weirdness would be cleared.

 

[Perihelion]

Yeah, I'll probably do something like that in the real scene. The arms animate, luckily, so it shouldn't be too bad to do.

UV mapping this in preparation for materials. I'll probably be using bump maps on a lot of things because the geometry is pretty simple.

 

[Perihelion]

Okay, think I'm going with this material setup.

Except for a few issues I need to fix...

 

[Perihelion]

Hmmm, this isn't as good as the others. Not sure what to do about it, though... I figured this one was going to be tough because there's not much I can do with the scene.

 

[arev]

How about placing the camera on the midle back seat, looking through the front windshield? You could then show the road passing by - a few blurred frames in a loop should suffice. Not sure if this even fits your concept, or is it even worth the additional work. As for the current shot - wouldn't you want the seat belts to be over the characters?

 

[Perihelion]

I originally had the camera facing the dash because it's more interesting, but I changed it because I realized the portraits would look extremely bizarre. As for seatbelts, yeah, I might draw seatbelts on top of them for this scene. I'll, er, figure it out when I get there? :S

 

[Perihelion]

Cool, I have my dialogue UI from the UI artist! I'll show it soon, but I need to pick a new font because it seems like the one she used costs money. Which font do you guys like the most of these three?

 

[Perihelion]

Going with the bottom one for now.

For comparison, what do you think about with a gradient?

 

[StrawberrySmiles]

I kind of like the first one better.

 

[Perihelion]

The font or the UI?

 

[StrawberrySmiles]

UI.

I dunno why though. Just feels like I can read it better. D:

 

[Perihelion]

Okay, cool. Thanks! I'm leaning towards that one too. Maybe I should have posted it at 1080p, though.

 

[arev]

I like the bottom one more, but only if the buttons color matches the gradient. As for the font - I can't really find any distinctive features between the second and the third. The first one is to narrow, so I'd go with one of the other two.

 

[Xhukari]

I can't discern the difference between the 2nd and 3rd fonts either; though I didn't even notice the narrowing of the 1st until Arev pointed it out... But I agree about it being too narrow, so I prefer the other two.
And I much prefer the second UI by far. Trying to read the text with the top one, I feel like the UI decoration is trying to compete for my eyes' attention with how much they stand out.
Though with how me and Strawberry have opposing opinions on the readability -- perhaps provide both, with an option to switch between the two in some options screen?
But perhaps I am just a sucker for a good options screen. :p

 

[Perihelion]

Haven't posted in a while, but UI and portraits are coming along well from contractors, and I'm working on the third draft (fifth if you count the first two drafts that I completely trashed) of the story. I have to add a few scenes and also fix a load of things. I'm making headway with it, but I keep discovering problems faster than I fix them... Urgh. I'm hoping to have the new scenes drafted by this week and maybe all the other issues fixed by next week, but we'll see how that goes. I'm pushing myself to make this story as good as I can, and it's very mentally exhausting. I miss being in the rough draft stages where I could fix all the problems later. Now it's later... :sad: :sad: :sad: :sad: :sad: :sad: :sad:

 

[Perihelion]

I have spent the entire last month editing and am not done yet. Really awful.

Anyway, right now I'm trying to figure out a logo. I tried a few, but I'm not wild about any of them:

I'm gonna try some more typography-oriented ones...