Game Maker Progress 52: New Graphical Assets Sizes

Hello everyone,

The last week has been fairly production in relation to my dissertation. This has meant that I had to shift focus away from Foundation of Civilisation for a while, however.

After up-scaling the sizes of the tiles - which means that UI elements, for instance, would need to be larger and thus allow for a greater amount of detail to be drawn onto them, it became necessary to figure out exactly how much larger the new images will be. I will be going through and standardising the various UI elements - as well as organising, and where possible, using and manipulating a single image to achieve multiple purposes further down the line, however this has given me a small insight on the new sizes of the UI images, and what to expect later on.

The new graphical sizes [Those listed in the coloured columns] are, at default zoom level, 6 times larger than what was originally used. Needless to say - jumping from 78 x 40 pixels to 468 x 240 pixels opens up a large amount of room for detail and improving the aesthetic aspect of the project. However, this is not the only aspect of the new UI I will be touching on to.

As perviously mentioned - I will be going through the UI to standardise the various UI elements - which will make it far easier to both code, implement, and change as progress is made. This means splitting the various images into something akin to Small, Medium, Large buttons; then modifying those images to create distinguishable buttons as needed; including adding text to the button itself. This is most relevant for the Build Icons and certain backgrounds used for menus such as the Build Menu. Build Icons are each a unique sprite - and for the sake of keeping the resource tree of the project clean - I will be looking into gathering those images into a single sprite, and using Frames to pick which icon to use.

The plan for this overhaul of the UI is make it easier to add, remove and modify menus later on. As I will be working on updating the graphical quality of the UI - it seemed appropriate to schedule the overhaul now - to better see which UI elements need an improvement, and which will likely be modified later on down the line.

Until next time,

Dylan