Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Regimental colors

cliffski

Today I got a decent chunk of work done for the regimental colors editor for GTB. GSB only had your user name, which didn’t really add a feeling of connection to the other player, so GTB will have your regimental logo (like a cap-badge insignia) associated with your maps and armies, so hopefully players will feel more like they are really fighting against proper opponents.

I plan to support user-designed, uploaded logos too, but because 95% of players won’t be arsed to do that, there is a simple editor that arranges a logo out of 3 layers and renders it to disk as your profile logo. The rendering isn’t done yet, but the rest is:

You can choose between a bunch of graphics and the three layers get combined, with a choice of some colors, plus you can move elements up and down and scale them. It’s the bare minimum that will give me an assurance that you will generally see fairly unique logos for all your opponents when playing other players armies. Plus it was fun to do :D

The problem with code like this is you can get *too* into it. I could happily spend a week doing a fully featured military insignia designer with a ton of features, but you can’t have that attitude with a game as huge as GTB if it’s ever going to ship :D I really hope the game does well enough for people to get into designing really cool logos. GSB has a great modding community and I’d love to see them go to town with stuff like this.

 

14 thoughts on Regimental colors

  1. This looks great, Cliff. Powerful, yet easy to understand with not too many options/controls to overwhelm the player.

    Would be cool if putting new alpha-maps (PNGs? GIFs?) in was as simple as putting them in the right directory for the game to see them… :)

  2. As always cliff, I enjoy your User-Interfaces, they are easy to understand, simple, and yet powerful.

    A little worried about custom logos, just because there will always be those people who throw up inappropriate stuff, is there any chance of a ‘report’ function? I can’t imagine you would have the time to be arsed with policing an entire game full of reports, and I’ve no idea how to handle custom logos without a load of work…

    Or you could just let stuff happens as it happens and hope for the best.

  3. looking pretty neat and simple to use. :)

    I know what you mean by getting *too* into it. Some features are more fun than others to develop. Got to be disciplined as your own boss. ;)

  4. Yup the system will happily list any logos that you dump into that folder, and I suspect I might need a reporting function, just in case people stupidly upload something racist / offensive.
    Worth it though, to have really unique customised emblems for your army :D

  5. It would be interesting to have a site where a user can upload their deigns for the masks. Then people can share, and community moderation would be easier.

  6. I like this idea!
    If you get time after the initial release, you could always include an even better editor in the form of a free patch or as part of a DLC pack.
    Out of interest, will the badge be put onto the units as well? I think ti would be really cool if it was. Hey, if you’ve got the time you could even allow the player to choose where on their customised units they want the badge to go!

  7. A good idea indeed! Especially that you plan to support user import. You should think about a way to implement this logo even further into the game but that may get tricky with a 2d engine I think. I was thinking about flag poles where your logo would wave in the wind or something of that sort.

  8. I never got into modding GSB, but I’d definitely look into getting a user imported logo if that’s to be an option; I definitely like the sound of this. Just the basic thing without user imports looks a lot better than most emblem designers that games have, with the multiple layers, etc.

  9. This is definitely a cool idea, but I’d like to be able to see more customization with the layers.
    I absolutely hate to use this as an example, but that emblem creator in Blops comes to mind.

  12. No, the units are tiny. The soldier are only seen top down, and only 24 pixels across on normal zoom :D

Comments are currently closed.