Beren Hurin
Onslaught Inc
RISE of LEGION
2367
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Posted - 2014.05.20 19:16:00 -
[1] - Quote
Well, what's the immersion goal?
Are you just switching between menu screens? Or are you trying to give the sense that you are in your body one minute, and then blasting through space the next? Is your consciousness temporarily digitally rendering a menu at one point? Or are you only ever conscious in a body? What is the reason for the swap between 3rd and 1st person? Dust or Eve don't currently answer a lot of these questions currently, but they may inform design.
I think the Assassin's creed loading screen captures the sense of a 'trapped consciousness' well. I don't know if that's something that you'd be going for.
I think something like...
...a loading screen that was an empty plain of dust particles, floating amidst a mostly black universe of rotating stars (with a local nebula from Eve), but then through slightly aggressive joystiq moving and button mashing you could 'will' it to take a gelatinous bodily form and start taking steps forward. It would be ghostly and mostly formless. It would first be just a mound that moves around. You could give it commands that kind of resemble things your clone would do. "Jump" would make it materialize a little higher. "Fire" might pulse a little bit of color into the grey lump of particle goop. "Sprint" would let it begin to form what could resemble moving legs. "Firing too fast" might send the whole fragile heap crashing back to the ground.
Perhaps as you level up this 'limbo' state could also grow in integrity, where the form could become more and more distinguishible, eventually resembling the 'clone you wish to be' or something...
But this "Particle World" could tie your two screens together. Depending on the 'mood' you want to set, you could transition our of your mercenary quarters into a scanning mode with a mellow and serene mood. But a 'post-battle' transition, especially after a loss, could transfer you through the 'limbo' with much more stress and drama.
With the regional nebula as a backdrop to the 'limbo' this could be the 'contextualizing key' that links one region-system-station to the next. As you scan through systems through an overview map, your clone/dust/soup swirls as if it is its own galaxy with its own clouds and clusters. As you highlight one region to the next, full resolution backdrops of region nebulae change. The dust/soup also changes hues to give a sense of the relative danger of the space. It quickly dances excitedly and angrily, like an overflowing pot when scrolling through nullsec systems, it swirls like river rapids while in lowsec, and takes on a much more peaceful flow while in highsec. |