Week Six / Day Five - Chromovis

As an end of the week celebration to myself I worked on art for most of the day. I added some tweaks to the font atlas and the font rendering code so that the letters have some effects, as well as an outer border. It cleans the letters up and gives them a more 'production look'. Subtle, but something that I have been meaning to tidy up. I also would like to announce the name of my game: Chromovis. I've been referring to the game as Chromo since I started working on it, as the core game mechanic relied on color. However, I didn't have a good ending, so I just stuck with Chromo until it was time to make a logo, and I decided today it was time to make a logo. 'vis' is latin for force, therefore Chromovis means color force. With that comes the updated title screen:



After I had decided on a name, I started to look around for fonts to use. However, there are very few fonts that are completely free, available for commercial use. I was honestly blown away by this. I really hope someday a site comes around offering thousands of open fonts for anyone to use. In the mean time, I needed a solution that didn't cost the extravagant amounts being asked for licensing rights in a small game ($1k+ for ONE LOGO). What I did was take one of the free fonts, wrote Chromovis in the font in GIMP, and than edited over that font to get what you see. I think it came out well.

There are a few other changes, such as a (in my opinion) better icon logo that I use for the loading screen. Seen here are the new and old respectively:




I'll probably (i.e. will) end up changing it again, but for now it's cleaner than it was. The intro to the game also transitions into the main menu much smoother now, first fading from the loading screen, to a studio presents screen, and finally fading into the menu. I'm not a fan of the obnoxious watermark required by the software I used for my last capture, so I'll forgo the video this time.

That is about it for this week. There is still a lot to do, and I think Monday is going to involve more interface cleanup. I haven't begun to tackle the Level Select screen so that will probably get top priority. I have some changes I'd like to make the the top score saving to better suit updates once the game hits the app store, so that's another task to take care of. Needless to say I've got my work cut out for me, so stay tuned.