Bonnie, a single mother of three, lives alone with her children. Her husband, Clyde, left 15 years ago to "get some cigarettes" , but he never returned. In actuality, he left her to enter the Necronomicon, so that he might ascend to eldritch godhood. Left alone to raise their children, rage builds inside her as she begins to uncover the truth. The kids can take care of themselves for a couple of days, right?
I also did quality assurance testing on a pre-alpha build of Necronomicon that can be found here.
While working on Necronomicon, my main focus was ensuring that artwork was properly implemented and integrated into the latest build of the game as this was apparently an issue in several of GADIG's previous titles. Thus, when working on specifically the title screen of Necronomicon, I communicated frequently with the Art Team to ensure a smooth integration of their work into the game.
The menu did not work properly.
Despite these art assets being made in Unity, some file formatting prevented me from using a portion of the artwork for the main menu. Luckily, I had the idea of the main menu in mind already and reformatting the art work did not take long.
I took still images provided by the Art Team and made them interactables to make the start and exit buttons. After that, Inserting and centering the icon was easy. The only issue I had left was inserting the side bars.
When making the in-game UI for Necronomicon, this time I communicated heavily with the Design Team. We both quickly identified that Necronomicon is designed to be a fast paced, first person shooter paying homage to games such as the original Doom.
With that in mind, we agreed that Necronomicon should have as few UI elements as possible while still conveying as much info as possible.
I made the conscious decision to include a health bar; an aiming reticle; and an ammo counter only. Anything else could easily clutter up the screen. I also chose to make the Pistol and Ammo font colors green and blue respectively to help the player more easily distinguish important information. This is especially helpful when the majority of the game itself is red.
I learned a lot about working as a programmer and how to interface with different teams or departments in order to create UI elements for both the Main Menu and for game and the In-Game UI, with a focus on a minimalistic HUD. With the Art Team's designs, I was able to translate images into interactable buttons in Unity.
I was also able to learn about animators and how they work by transitioning from one still image to the next like a flow chart in Unity. Admittedly, it was while working in a stressful environment, but I was able to pull through despite that!
I also became more comfortable with using Git. Having to constantly commit and push when possible and pull whenever there was a new build was essential to the success of Necronomicon.
If I were given more time to work on Necronomicon's UI elements, I would have loved to Talk more with our Art Team in making a better looking reticle and icons. Changing the gun and ammo UI from simple to an icon with a number next to it would convey the same amount of information without making the player read it out. I think we could have made the health bar much smaller to better align with our idea of a minimalistic HUD.
I also would have liked to add a screen or image that displays the player controls. While WASD controls are standard for a mouse and keyboard set up, it's not always obvious to all players as we found out in our late testing stages.
Overall the project went fairly smoothly in terms of the UI elements and I am incredibly glad to have worked on it as a member of GADIG.
After Necronomicon, I was able to focus on our next project: Lullaby Heist.