Posted April 04, 2019 by Andrea Interguglielmi
Nauticrawl does not have any 2D heads up display at all, and as I've been recently told on twitter, this type of interface is referred to as "diegetic".
From wikipedia:
In video games "diegesis" comprises the narrative game world, its characters, objects and actions which can be classified as "intra-diegetic".
Status icons, menu bars and other UI which are not part of the game world itself can be considered as "extra-diegetic".
In other words, Nauticrawl's user interface is also the world in which you play the game, sounds cool 8 )
Unfortunately, it also means that every time I need to add something new to this user interface, I have no automatic tools to make room for new stuff, so I might easily get stuck somewhere along the line if the layout of controls are in need of a big change.
Here you can see an example of my very accurate design plan, it looks like this time I got lucky and there is enough space right where I needed it.
Now that I have a clear enough "plan", I can start modeling the new controls, but before I do that I need to also think about the clues I will give away on what this new levers will do, and that's because this user interface has no guide or tutorial at all.
Without a tutorial the user experience becomes a puzzle, so the cockpit has to be made in a way that gives some visual clues and consistency, but also force the player to experiment in order to figure things out.
That's it, levers done! And even though they are only useful while the player is trying to figure out how to move the machine, they serve the important purpose of allowing a smooth transition from mouse to keyboard bindings once the game's focus shits onto exploring the world map.
They might come in handy again for future ports though (cough, touch screens, cough).