In this week’s update, we have various treats for both the eyes and ears of the Wolfpack!
Coming up we’ll be presenting to you;
1) Further upgrades to our UI Main menu system with commentary from our UI designer.
2) Some audio samples (still in progress) from our sound engineer for in-game animations and our main menu.
3) More sneak peeks from our upscaled cards collection!
We hope you like what you see!
But before we continue, we would like to mention that as each week goes by and we post further progress of our game development — that we are aware that the community will be anticipating ETA’s or similar progress indicators for the Alpha Testing Phase.
Our meeting between the core team and the entire game development team is due over the coming week, where we’ll be getting accurate insight into the tasks remaining leading to the Alpha Testing Phase. As always we will share our information with the community.
As those keeping up with our updates will be aware — we have shared constant development from week to week. From progress fixing bugs to our board upgrades, UI upgrades, animations, our portal etc.
We will continue to inform the community to the best of our ability and we deeply thank the patience and support from those who can see our vision.
Now then — let’s get into things!
Further Upgrades to our User Interface
Our UI has been featured in various write-ups as of late, such as here where we took you on the journey of turning our ‘Menu System’ into a full ‘Lobby System’
But we’re always in development, fine-tuning every aspect of Shiryo!
We got our UI designer to lend us some words about the latest updates.
“We’ve been making further progress with the Shiryo Game UserInterface, finalizing and polishing all the assets required for the testing phase.
Initially starting as a wireframe for us to figure out functions, user journey flow and visual hierarchy.
We have been working from these wireframes, having meeting after meeting and making constant iterations towards our final UI design and art direction for the testing phase.
We’re very passionate about getting this right both in its function and it’s aesthetics and we’re really happy with the progress so far.
Here are some of the improvements from the wireframe to our latest iteration;
UI Before
UI After
Here’s a list of our improvements;
⁃ Improved navigation. Easy access to all aspects of the game from your card collection, quests and more!
⁃ Added our new chat/social system
⁃ Refinements to other visual assets to capture Shiryo’s theme better. Note small changes like our menu tabs with the Wolf claw appearing that casually enhance the theme and bring the game into its own.
We will still be making constant revisions as we progress. But we thought we’d share a little update here because we are getting closer to our final UI for testing release!
We will have more exciting UI improvements to follow in the very near future which we can’t wait to show you all.
Shiryo’s Sounds
A game is not complete without the right sounds, whether it’s a background theme playing as a game opens its main menu, sounds for special effects and animations — or even just clicking a menu tab.
We’ve used placeholder sounds for promotional videos in the past, but these days our sound designer is hard at work creating unique sounds for our game.
Sound designer: There are many sounds we’re making great progress on, namely around our animations. It’s a fun process to work through, seeing an effect get played and imagining what each element should really sound like.
Some are easier to imagine like the sound of an item freezing over, but when we imagine things like ‘projectile fire’… that takes a little more imagination.
How is fire meant to sound hurdling across the board, what does it sound like when fire hits an opponent, how would it sound at different strengths? How will the length of the animation affect this?
It’s a process I’m really enjoying working through and with how determined our game development team is to get everything right, I look forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end.
Our Shiryo game theme music is still very much a work in progress, we have some different themes created and I’m experimenting with different styles but we haven’t found ‘the one’ just yet. Our main focus right now is the animation sounds, once we’ve made more progress — more time will be allocated to the soundtrack. I know we’ll produce something that really represents Shiryo well.
We’ve uploaded some examples showing animation sounds and one of the soundtrack experiments to our announcement channel here;
We received great feedback on our upscales, so this week it only made sense to share more of the collection with the Wolfpack.
Please make note, our upscales are still a work in progress and are all currently subject to review, further amendments may be made. To quote from last week:
When we look at the cards we’re not trying to fix what isn’t broken, if a card has great detail then we’re providing minimal adjustments or none-at-all. For example, our Mythics have such relentlessly great detail and artistic quality that we’ve entirely left them alone.
We’re looking for things such as anatomical faults in a wolf, i.e we have some card examples where a wolf’s paw has had little to no shape, a head may have a mouth or snout missing, fur may look too ‘blocky’ so we may add some detail.
Other things include low-resolution backgrounds — we’ve sought to bring these areas up without taking any attention away from the wolf itself. There are also cards where color enhancements or lighting adjustments could work well (i.e glowing eyes).
