Spark bonuses (Patreon)

Heyo! Work on Chapter 2 progresses. In fact, it's nearly done, despite me making an entire-ass operation with multiple patients, siccing it on two playtesters, concluding that "this is ridiculous and needs to be moved to a later chapter", and then making an entire-ass new operation also with multiple patients to replace it. ...

It's fine. The new operation is way better in terms of what "should" be in Chapter 2. And you'll still get to see the original operation later.

Anyway.

For whatever reason, I seem to use Spark often in mock-ups, concept art, and other screenshottable situations. Since Spark recently got his character introduction, I figured I may as well share some of said screenshots...

(Perhaps "Spark bonuses" wasn't as great of a title as I had originally thought... oh well.)

An early version of 1-3 (1-4 at the time) with a ton of placeholder graphics. ...actually, I think literally everything in this screenshot are placeholders other than Spark himself.

You can see the style of the HUD was very much undecided. So, too, was the positioning and sizing of it all. COND, TECH, and the Scanner all didn't exist yet. Pictured here was the second (working) version of the HUD.

Yes, that is, in fact, a loose Driver screw tray there on the left. I hope you're glad the current tray has discrete places for each screw instead of whatever abomination this was going to be. (Yes, a "magnetic tray" Overclock was an idea.)

The third version of the HUD. I entertained the idea of putting whoever's talking to you in a little box, to make it feel more like the interface was from your eye. But... eh, I think being able to see more of the character is more important.

I had gotten a working, placeholder COND bar going in this build. (It's near the top-left, under the Vitals.)

I moved the COND bar to the center and dropped the 'picture-in-picture' style of character portrait in this early version of 1-2. I also implemented the EKG!

No, the electronic guts of the liver shown here are not the same as what's in the demo. It's actually a mechanic I had scrapped/stowed for later...

Here, most of the placeholders were replaced. Still todo were the tool icons, the tools themselves (is that a straw??), and the insides of the synthetic liver.

I had also started to finally get character expressions working in operations. Hence why Spark has a different pose in this screenshot.

The internals are now done, with a cool shimmering effect and some proper circuitry. Spark is finally showing another different pose, and the aforementioned placeholders have been replaced.

Also, I will never remove the "I forgot which resistor goes where" bit. It's too funny.

An old screenshot of the VN part of the game. ...Spark, you're definitely not supposed to look that tall.

I also tried playing around with some wacky potential color styles. The first was a non-shaded, sort of cel-like '90s cartoon style. The second, some sort of VHS-y grainy look. Both with closed-captioning-like dialogue.

Yeah, uh... I gotta say, I like the current UI a lot better. But hey, it was a good exercise.

Wow, look at the time! I think that's it for this post. When I have time, I'll come back to some of these topics because... I actually did reveal a decent amount of stuff here, didn't I? (In-game HUD designs; Driver tool mechanics; organ sprite designs; tool sprite designs; VN UI designs, ...)

Until next time!