#ndiedev

LEAD ARTIST - Joey | What’s on the Menu?

After finishing up a character it is sometimes nice to have a breather with some “lighter” work. Since Bas has been reworking the UI and menu systems we needed various new menu assets. This was also a great time to give said menus more visual uniformity by correcting some aesthetic incongruities. Early Counterspell menu items had a grimy, very weathered metal look, but this shifted to cleaner stone-like qualities with the character select screen. The changes are very apparent in the Game Mode Select screen in particular.

The old Game Mode Select screen.

Assets for the new Game Mode Select screen.

The new Game Mode Select screen also had to accommodate for more game modes and a list for player-created variants on said game modes.

The different icons for all current main game modes.

The Stage Select interface was needlessly elaborate and had to accommodate more for user-generated content, as well as a different way to show which hazards were present on the currently selected stage.

Different hazard icons. The greys and blues are in line with the color scheme of the standard Foundry tileset.    

The one thing we really like and therefore maintain in the reworked Stage Select screen are the stage holograms. In order to elevate its presence I’ve made a model for the actual hologram device.

Spin me right round.

LEAD PROGRAMMER - Jeroen | Rebuilding the Builder

In the past two weeks I’ve been working on a few features and an overhaul. One of these features I don’t quite want to talk about yet. It’s a feature that’s important for the final release, but it’s not quite done yet, and I’ll talk more about it once I’ve gotten the time to focus on it. The other feature is less impressive: The audio options menu. You can set the SFX volume, BGM volume and master volume of the game here. Nothing big.

Now, let us talk about this big overhaul. A while back I wrote about how I redid the Game Ruleset menu. The way it was set up was… Disappointing to say the least. But besides that, there was something bigger. Something else that was all set up to fit the basic needs. The Foundry: our level editor.

The Foundry was initially set up to work functionally, but it has never been final (and still isn’t yet). It always had a few simple keybinds for a few functions - even though the structure was all set up to work way more dynamically. As of right now, my task is to make use of that, and make the Foundry (finally) user-friendly!

Being a bit messy at first, I’ve begun to clean up the Foundry’s code, separating a whole controller system off of the main system - which allowed me to bring in some tweaks regarding camera control and the likes. Selecting “tiles” has become much easier using a menu and I’ve added in a few options for Ernst to add in effects when tiles are removed.

We now have effects AND better camera movement!

Thanks for being interested in our game and its development!

Check out Counterspell on Greenlight! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=643651505

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