I Spent A Week Working on Stadiums and UI for my Football Game!

http://footballrewritten.com/ - Please consider supporting! Last week I showed you how I’d spent a couple of weeks working on the new procedural animations in my game, and if you haven’t seen that video, make sure you check it out, but what good is being able to smoothly dribble, control and kick a ball, if the rest of the game is just not enjoyable. That means a UI that isn’t laggy or hard to navigate, like a couple of other football games, and one that looks nice on the pitch too. So that’s the two areas I focussed on this week. Stadiums & UI. We’ll start by talking about the UI, which has undergone quite a big change since you last saw it. I wanted something that works for everyone, so I’ve tried to make it as customisable as possible, but also base it on things I know I like in older football games. So here it is. It’s designed about showing you the data you actually need to see. Before the home page had like 10 panels, and this one still has quite a bit of info, but its just displayed easier to see. I wanted to make your club colour effect more than just one strip on the navbar at the top, so now it colours basically every UI element. The top bar has been made smaller to get more info onto each page, but still shows the key areas you’re going to want to see. In the background you also have the clubs stadium, which has a layer blur im not too sure about yet. I might make it an option to unblur it. But, if you have a slower PC or don’t like the colours, you can overlay a solid colour on top of the stadium to make it darker or brighter, or turn the stadium off altogether and just show a single colour. It’s totally up to you. On the squad page you can see we’ve made colour more even, with no rainbows that are hard on your eyes, instead i use bold for high attributes and important info, like names, overall and value. I decided to move on from the big pics of players, as much as I liked it, it just made it too hard to actually fit info in. Instead of the big pic now we have more info on the player available to see straight away. I’ve changed the style of every page to be similar, with info you need to know easy to find. Take the academy page, the last version had which clubs were in which regions, which is nice to know but not crucial at first glance, so now the map is the main event, and the club info is moved to the nation page instead. There’s a line between making your games simple to use, and looking like a mobile app, and I hope you don’t think i’ve crossed that line just yet. I’ve still got to work on scaling, so right now you’re looking at the 1080p version of the UI being stretched to fit a 1440p monitor, but it’s a big performance improvement and screen flow improvement from what was there before, at least in my opinion. So on to stadiums! I’ve shown in some of the previous videos how I can mass produce them, which is great for starting points or placeholders, but I really want to make things more unique. With close to 10000 teams in the game, spanning 55 years, every stadium being a modern bowl is something I wanted to avoid. So, instead, i’ve spent a few days sourcing and creating props for the stadiums that can be combined into better options. To test them out, i’ve created a few different stadiums, so why don’t we go through them, and try to see some of the unique features they have. Let’s start with this one, the Town Ground, that is based on the typical English second & third division stadiums. Four stands, floodlights, a burger van and a tacked on corner piece that was added in the late 90s. That’s the vibe this stadium goes for. But speaking of vibe, what if we wanted to play at night? Do the flood lights work? Yes. They do work. They use the real life illumination values for a real stadium, with each of those lights being an actual functioning light that casts illumination on a player. It’s pretty cool to be honest. But it’s not just day and night, it’s actually an entire smooth system of day to night progression that I’m really happy with. A game can start in the day, transition to dusk and when it makes sense, the floodlights turn on. It makes it feel like your game is in a real world. Let’s check out another city, this one is in Southern Europe. It’s another lower league stadium, this time based in the middle of a city. It’s got some more unique European buildings, it’s got another vibe, and again, it’s got a day night cycle too. You want your home ground to be memorable, whether it’s the Town Grounds slanted roof, or this grounds warehouse building that holds up one of the stands. Fans in the crowd will wear your teams colours, with stripes, hoops, sashes and single colours supported atm, but i’ll also overlay the sponsors too before I release the game.