Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

Demo Cleanup

We're not too far off from having this demo all prettied up. We have the 64x64 map tiled out. Once that's done we'll work on villager and player avatar sprites. One major touch up we want to do to the current HUD is to recreate the 'jewel look'.

Making buildings
We're going cartoony and easily recognizable. One challenge is juxtaposing average everyday business buildings with the social enteprise buildings that we want to stand out on the map, looking attractive and easily recognizable. Bright, clean and shiny for the social enterprise buildings. Average, not entirely decriped for the average office buildings.

Pretty HUD

We need to re-create our HUD. We got the layout figured out but right now it's too flat and brown. We need to recreate our topbar using the same texture, depth as the windows XP start bar except make it green instead of blue. The borders around the bottom part of the hud should match it well. Our HUD is fitted to 1024 x 768 pixel screensize. Make the topbar 1024 pixels wide and 30 pixels tall.

Player Character
We need a character made up at 60 degree angle. I know, I know. 45 degrees is the overwhelming default for these kind of games, but they kinda annoy me. I don't like it when my character disappears behind a building or tree and I can't click him, so we're going with a high angle like Warcraft II. The character will fit on one tile but can spill over into neighboring tiles. When we get around to animating the player character we'll he/she will move only in 8 directions, up, down, left, right, and four diagonals. I doubt we'll have time or budget to create several animated characters so if we complete one cartoony guy with the same skintone as the guy in our cover art that will suffice and use him for our player avatar and our villagers. Yeah, our village will have the same gender ratio as the Smurfs without Smurfette, but oh well. To add variety we'll have to make a simple change like different colored shirts.

Animation
The highest priority animation for the villager and the player character is walking in all 8 directions. After that we'll nail down 'tending crop', 'pumping pump', 'rejoicing', and 'crying' animations.