Blog Post
Rebots Roundup #7
Rebots Roundup #7 is in full swing and we are ready to tackle an interesting problem – asteroid selection (Rebots’ mission selection screen)!
We setup 6 points as criteria for what a good asteroid selection system needs to be:
- Allows the player to select different planets, and understand where they are
- Gates the player’s progress by locking parts of the field that they are not ready to visit yet
- Supports adding planets with new features in the future
- Is fun and feels good to navigate from planet to planet
- Evokes adventure
- Sustainable for our team from a technical and art standpoint
Prototyping
With these criteria in mind, we actually had quite a few options available for us with 2 major aspects: players viewpoint (first-person, third-person, top down) and free flight vs node based navigation. We actually prototyped multiple variations that combined these 2 aspects in different ways. The first 3 prototypes were:
- First-person, node-based flight (Image 1.)
- Top down, free flight (Image 2.)
- First-person, node-based choosing planets from within the ship
First Iteration of Asteroid Selection
Funnily enough, we added a small addition to the first prototype – by pressing M, the player got a top down overview of the asteroid field. This small thing turned out to be quite good, so after testing these different prototypes, we actually ended up with a combination of the first 2 prototypes with the top down view that was added to the first prototype.
After settling on this version, we created a concept art for how the asteroid selection will look like (Image 3.) and the first iteration of the implementation can be seen in Image 4.
We are quite happy how the asteroid selection turned out especially in relation to our criteria we set up from the beginning. There are definitely improvements to be made in the future however such as
- Reworking the interaction system on this screen to be more player friendly as well as add controller support
- Improve the way we show information about asteroids – inhabitants, state of the planet, information about available resource and more
Eager to learn more?
Join the Discord!