Art In Pinkerton
(mis)adventures of Martin in Writing, Podcasting, and more
Big blocky buttons
HUD
For the HUD (that shows at the bottom of the screen when playing), I fiddled extra long on how to redesign the buttons. I wavered back and forth on keeping the original art or replacing it with words or a different picture. I considered removing or subduing some of the more garish design aspects such as the yellow squares pinning the corners. However, unlike my other projects, ADP is quasi-purist in it’s attempt to keep the “feel” of the original artwork. I ultimately decided to just clean up the buttons but keep the art as close to the original as possible (making minor modifications). The only exception was the USE button; That one was a pain in the butt. Nothing I tried seemed to work well AND convey to the user that it was meant to be the “USE” button. In the end, I settled for a “U”. Not overly inspired but I wasted a lot of time on it and we have to pick our battles sometimes.
Example
You can see above the original HUD and below the new one. I used one sword for attack to keep it simpler and clean and I changed the journal parchment to a book which I feel better conveys it’s purpose while differentiating it from the map directly above.
NOTE: While I did the background around the players head, in game it must use a different texture since it’s the same as the original. Also, I experimented with making the HUD partially transparent but as I suspected, the game doesn’t render below the start of the HUD and it just turned out black.
- Starting dungeon
Art In Pinkerton 