Follow-up development

Here is a collection of my work. Since most of my substantive tasks were completed during the Christmas holiday period, I will list them here and provide explanations.

If you haven’t visited my blog yet, I sincerely hope you can go and check it out. Start from the first week because this page is the continuation of my blog.

This is the image of the invisible “scale”. I referred to the “Millennium Scale” in the famous card game “Yu-Gi-Oh!”. It is a balance used to measure people’s hearts, with feathers on one side and the other side empty.

You can see that at the center of my “scale”, there is a decoration resembling an eye. I call it the “Eye of the Heart”. It can see through good and evil, so it is right in the center.

Let me explain. Why do I always call this balance “invisible”, yet it has its own appearance and appears on the back of the hand of the character controlled by the player?

Here, “invisibility” does not refer to visual invisibility, but rather the invisibility at the game system level. Players will never be able to see any value bars or timers of karma.

In the game, there is a setting that the pattern on the back of the protagonist’s hand is invisible to others. It is not a physical item; only the protagonist can see it (this is also for the convenience of players).

As for why Roman numerals are used?

It’s very simple because it looks very formal, very classic and very “artistic”

This is also the decision I made after reading some articles

here are two UI schematic diagrams that I drew. The only difference between these two diagrams is that I changed “emotion” in the upper left corner to “reputation”. This was because when I initially designed this UI, I wanted to display the protagonist’s emotions in the UI interface to remind the players. For example, if the player’s reputation is low, they will be treated coldly by others, and at this time, the protagonist will enter a sad mood. The face below the emotion bar will then turn into a crying face. Later, after I read some articles about UI design, I omitted this step. Now, players can directly see their reputation level.

This is a game concept art illustration I created. This picture shows the details of the environment in the game when the player has high karma and low karma.

On the left is an example of high karma. You can see that I used a lot of colors with high saturation. This is because in my research, I learned that high saturation, warm colors, and a bright environment can better give people a sense of comfort.
Grass, flowers, a clear sky, a mobile phone, and a brand-new house – these items are used to represent that the player is surrounded by “goodness”, and everything around is telling the player that his current “good” is greater than “evil”.

On the right side, on the other hand, are the manifestations of low karma. The same lawn, house, trees, sky, but they are broken, withered and decaying. The house was in a dilapidated state, with peeling paint and even some holes in some areas. The screen of the mobile phone had cracks, and the clear sky was replaced by dark clouds. All of these created a sense of depression, and they were all telling the players that the “evil” at present was greater than the “good”.

The origin of this scene may sound funny, but in fact, it was a preview map that a real estate agent showed me while I was out for a walk. I combined my own memory to draw this picture.

This picture is a schematic diagram of a system in the game. On the back of the game’s protagonist’s right hand, there will be a constantly changing Roman numeral and a balance pattern, which can also be called a “tattoo”. Its function is to inform the player which day it is today and how much time is left until the Seventh Day Judgment.
The direction in which the balance tilts represents whether the player’s current karma leans more towards good or evil.

The direction in which the balance tilts represents whether the player’s current karma leans more towards good or evil.
The inspiration for this design came from an island survival game I played a long time ago called “Stranded Deep”. I was deeply impressed by his design of putting all the status bars of the game characters into a watch, so I tried to adopt a similar design.

Stranded Deep

I also attempted to build a model white box in UE5. Although I didn’t finish it in the end, I still accomplished some things.

These are all the things I learned following the tutorials available on the internet.

This is an interactive effect that I tried to create. You can see that when the player’s controlled character approaches the door, the door will display “Press E” to inform the player that they should press the E key at this moment for interaction.

This is an indoor scene that I attempted to create. I used the free model assets available in the UE5 marketplace. Then, I adjusted the lighting in the scene and added collision boxes to the items and terrain within the scene.

Sources