Hello, everyone! How's it going?
A HUD from the Ground Up!
One of the first decisions on how to expand the original Last Dive's difficulty design was to add a HP meter. It sounds basic, but now you have to keep track of your life in order to avoid suffering a slight backtrack (whereas in the original you would never suffer any significant backtrack, even when you played recklessly). Our first shot was the traditional heart counter. Coins and collectibles, and their HUD counterparts, were also added to the game to further reward exploration. Of course the first implementation was using only placeholder art.
When we implemented the realtime light feature that is now so prevalent in our art, the old HUD became all that more obsolete. Since we had to redraw all of that anyway, we also took the chance to make it more thematically appropriate by changing hearts into bubbles. It's not super innovative, but the whole point is that it just informs the HP but doesn't stand in the way. We also added HP shrines at the end of each area, as a reward for beating the difficulty of that segment.
Coins and collectibles were also reworked. At some point, we tried doing the same thematic approach to them. Black and white pearls were created to take those roles, but there was something that made it less satisfying to collect them than collecting coins. We also weren't sure they were fitting the mood very well, so we went for the safer (although possibly temporary) solution of keeping them as coins but reworking their graphics, which made them stay in a pleasant midground between realistic and abstract.
As the game progresses, we might feel the need to revisit those graphics and design decisions, but for the time being, they felt solid enough for us to move on to more pressing matters.
One of the first decisions on how to expand the original Last Dive's difficulty design was to add a HP meter. It sounds basic, but now you have to keep track of your life in order to avoid suffering a slight backtrack (whereas in the original you would never suffer any significant backtrack, even when you played recklessly). Our first shot was the traditional heart counter. Coins and collectibles, and their HUD counterparts, were also added to the game to further reward exploration. Of course the first implementation was using only placeholder art.
When we implemented the realtime light feature that is now so prevalent in our art, the old HUD became all that more obsolete. Since we had to redraw all of that anyway, we also took the chance to make it more thematically appropriate by changing hearts into bubbles. It's not super innovative, but the whole point is that it just informs the HP but doesn't stand in the way. We also added HP shrines at the end of each area, as a reward for beating the difficulty of that segment.
Coins and collectibles were also reworked. At some point, we tried doing the same thematic approach to them. Black and white pearls were created to take those roles, but there was something that made it less satisfying to collect them than collecting coins. We also weren't sure they were fitting the mood very well, so we went for the safer (although possibly temporary) solution of keeping them as coins but reworking their graphics, which made them stay in a pleasant midground between realistic and abstract.
As the game progresses, we might feel the need to revisit those graphics and design decisions, but for the time being, they felt solid enough for us to move on to more pressing matters.
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