Zombox

This week I worked on some animations for the leveling system.

Zombox will feature 50 possible character upgrades that can be earned as you gain XP. The upgrades themselves will include weapon/attack enhancements, fitness/stamina boosts, health bonuses, special crafting recipes, etc.

Each upgrade in the menu will be accompanied by an animation showing what it does (or what it applies to)…so those are what I’ve been working on this week. The tricky part is not only that there are 50 of them that need to be made, but also that most of them need to loop seamlessly.

Click the image below to see an animated .gif of a few of the menu animations (keep in mind that these are just rough renders from 3dsmax, and not yet integrated into the actual menus):

This week I worked on a few different things…

• You can now find dozens of books around the city of Zombox. You can read books by dragging them onto your character in the inventory window. When read, a book will reveal a crafting recipe to the player.

• When you craft something, or when you read a book’s crafting recipe, the recipe will be added to the new quick-craft panel. The quick craft panel can be opened by pressing an empty slot in the crafting window. In the quick-craft panel, you’ll see all of the recipes that you’ve learned, and if you have the ingredients for a specific recipe in your inventory, its icon in the quick-craft panel will be enabled. If you click an enabled icon, the corresponding recipe ingredients will be added to the crafting panel. This makes it easy and fast to craft things.

• Some items and weapons can now be ‘upgraded’ in NPC stores. If you find something damaged or broken, you can upgrade it to repair it. You can also upgrade some items past their default condition to special conditions like ‘new’, ‘shiny’, ‘special’ and ‘super’. These upgrades will greatly increase things like damage and/or critical hit values.

• You can now build storage chests to store your items in.

Click the images below to see animated examples of the above!