UI: The Sequel-ing

Was last week’s gigantic shift in UI not enough for you guys? No? Well it wasn’t enough for us either! This week at Pharaoh Hound, we did a first pass redesign of the secondary UI elements in Sons of Ra, being things like the keeps’ health bars, resource counters, and a personal favorite of Jeff’s, we also added a unit spawn queue visual showing upcoming units for each lane. Here she is in action:

While it might be boring that I only spawned Catapults in this example, their longer build time shows the function of the display better. Should you queue up multiple types of units, their respective images will show up in the order that you queue them, with a maximum of 6 (one actively building, and another 5 “waiting) being shown at a time. Should there be more than 6 units in the queue, when a unit is built, the un-shown unit will appear at the end of the line. Your information will not be lost!

In this gif you can also see our new health bar and redone visuals for gold and favor cost and available to the players. Like I said, this is a first pass, and we will be coming back to give these new elements a nice shine, in addition to the radial menu we showed you last week.

Starting Strong

While Jeff and Joe were hard at work on the UI, Michael was having some fun giving matches an exciting introduction. Now, rather than the game starting immediately after patron deity selection, the players will be greeted by this awesome new visual:

We felt that this gives matches a greater sense of gravity as well as a smoother start so that players are not thrust into the fray with no time to prepare. Like the new interface elements, we will be coming back around to this and making it even more awesome as time goes on.

In Closing

The name of the game for the immediate future is juice – camera shake, shiny new particle effects, and the like that will help make every action and event in the game feel even more interesting and impactful. Also, don’t tell anyone, but for the first time in about 6 months we are going to see some new scenery here in Sons of Ra. Stay posted, we’ll be back next week!