A few posts ago showed some new ship concepts. What you see here is the beginning process of giving more detail to one of the simple concepts. For this ship I'm keeping in mind lots of areas a player can place attachments to. Defiantly a battleship you will not want to encounter in space.  

Origin…

Hi everyone. This is the UI/UX artist Paul. This week I have a work in progress of the new Quick Auto-Designer, explained briefly at the beginning of our last Twitch stream. The Quick Designer is a simplified miniature version of the Auto Builder subscreen that players will be able to bring up on …

As with any game, sometimes the big things are the small things.  At a certain point stability is more important than new features.  To that end, while the visual issues with the terrain had been fixed before, there was the "to hit" problem, that sometimes made things hit mountains that weren't the…

Hi all. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul here. The Ship Builder Screen's visual uplift is going along well. Further refinements to the readouts and window arrangement are being implemented, as well as new features such as dedicated Tool Tip windows for various screens. This collection of subwindo…

Recent game updates have included more character to the Warmaster. He's even got a name now... Ares! With these updates I'm in the process of giving more detail reference of Ares. 

Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.

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Hi all. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul here. As our various screens are filled out graphically and new trends and aesthetic solutions are developed for newer screens, the older screens have begun to show their age. Hence I have been working on updating the Ship Builder subscreens to reflect our …

Render shots of the last gun for the ships. More will be created in the future but for now this is the last one.  Modeled in blender and textured in 3dcoat.

Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.

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So I was fiddling with a new shader program, and I tried to get the game's main shader running in it, and I was able to finally tweak the shader to show texture level shininess correctly.  You can see how it normally looked (the First in each series).  The first tweak made everything looked …

Hi all. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul here. This week I have an update for the RTS Screen: a more modernized menu backdrop for the popup Build Menu. The established theme of blue glass with transparency is being continued here, with further refinement on the way as we feel it out how much of the…

Last two gun models of the batch. I'm still in the process of the 4th gun but the next step is baking and texturing. 

Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.

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Until now, we've been using fonts optimized for the displays that were standard years ago. These classic fonts worked well enough, but not well per se. This has all changed now, as we've updated our font engine to use modern fonts, and the difference is significant: above, the new version; bel…

Hi all. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul. I've been busy tackling the Navigation Screen's visual design overhaul. Facelifting this screen is proving tricky. This screen more than any other will be subject to an overwhelmeing level of visual activity due to its nature as a real-time 3D RTS screen. For…

The Navigation screen (the RTS screen) is the heart of the RTS side of Rank: Warmaster.  With the terrain updates and other screens being updated, it was time for this side of the game to get worked on.  One of the larger problems with the RTS screen was the lack of coherent controls, so the playe…

Progress of the gun assets. 

Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.

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Hey everyone. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul. I've been adding more elements to the Multiplayer Screen. Now we have the Join Screen, which is essentially the vestibule to the Lobby Screen where players select which server they will be joining. Password entry as well as other settings will also be …

It's been a very long time coming, but the Terrain (at least visually) is finally fixed.  No more gaps, or very obvious triangles, so the weaving is correct.  Some of the equations still need some tweaking functionally, but visually it's fixed.  It also supports "tiles" of height maps so expect…

New 3d creations to share this week are low poly guns for players to place on ships. Like with the turret model, these also need to be a low poly count. I have some new texture brushes that will really push these forward as limited low polys. 

Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.

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Hi all. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul. The Multiplayer Lobby is coming along nicely! Screen real estate is being better prioritized and certain elements have been reduced accordingly, as can be seen with "Game Types" being removed and the Player Listing taking a front row center seat.

Original po…

As you may have noticed, when a sphere (including a planet) was presented in previous screen shots, the poles were always black.  This was a cosmetic issue for the most part, so wasn't high priority to fix.  Since landing on planets is becoming more important, that little dark spot can go for mile…

Updating the turrets with more detail. The tricky part to this is getting the detail baked into a low poly dome. After some testing, I have gotten the low poly's to 48 triangle faces. Currently in the process of fixing the uv map so the texture bake looks closer to the high poly model. 

The pi…

We've reached a turning point in the development of R:WM. Until this week, to one degree or another, we've been creating a foundation. As of our most recent play test the foundation and superstructure of the game all exist, and are ready and waiting to be filled in with game play. Not that there is…

Hi all. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul. This week I have the Multiplayer Lobby screen to show off for overhaul. This time I borrowed design elements from an older screen I had made, the Asset Screen, for its wide bands of tightly clustered horizontal text frames. Keeping in with the Config Screen…

Creating weapon launchers that can be customized to ships. As usual I'm starting out with silouhettes. The ends of the models will be rounded or capped off so even if the launcher passes through the ship's model, it'll look intentional and blend with the design.  Also added are some concepts for t…

The Multiplayer has expanded a great deal.  While building buildings might be nothing new, what you are seeing in the screen shot is the AI building buildings during multiplayer!  

As the title says, it is almost in parity with the single player experience.  What does that mean?  The last multipla…

Hello, this is your UI/UX Artist Paul here. Another small update but one that's undeniably useful nonetheless. Today I have Faction Logos! 

With a whole solar system full of hostile parties constantly leveling against you in real time (and multiplayer support coming along nicely) it is important t…

The final textured version of the red space ship.  Now onto creating the shields to call the ship finished and ready to be put into the game. 

Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.

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Hi all. This is your UI/UX Artist Paul with further updates to the Configuration Screen.

A backdrop has been agreed upon. The circuit board pattern fits the general theme of adjusting the in-game settings, and so it is now the official backdrop of all Config subscreens. The Resolutions Subscreen h…

Every piece of art has a moment when it's complete, when we have to move on to work on something else. Until then, we keep polishing, keep refining; for an interface, that means making things easier to see, more distinctive, more of a pleasure to look at. We've added some of these details to the a…

Unlike my last post, this one is more colorful. The ship has started to get a paint job. Texturing is being done in 3D Coat.

Original post blogged on Rank: Warmaster Dev Blog.

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Sometimes development doesn't yield a screen shot because it's behind the scenes. This is mostly one of those cases. The entire human input system was overhauled to be far more flexible and support more devices at the same time. The controls before while being able to be personalized, were univ…