BlizzCast Episode 8
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Bashiok: Also, on iterative processes, a lot of BlizzCon saw the skill icons. And there's been some talk in the community that the skill icons are definitely a departure from what we saw in Diablo II. Which were these gold runes, almost, I guess. So what was the decision there to make a change to the skill icons, and do, y'know colorful skill icons?
Mike: I am unabashedly a fan of WoW, I'll probably catch flak (oh you're making it look like WoW oh no!) but I love them, I love the WoW icons. And y'know what we're trying to do is see, ok what works about the WoW icons? They're illustrative; is there a way to try to maybe bridge the gap. You know what worked about the more symbolic DII icons, and what works with the WoW icons, and trying to find a way to put the two together. And that's really what I'm trying to do is to try to make them more symbolic, so they're not necessarily little murals, but they are painterly. So they are colorful because you're going to have a lot more of them than you would in DII. So you have the hot bar at the bottom, and you want that to look colorful enough that it's interesting, but not to the point where it's an eyesore. And quite honestly I've made many iterations on the icons, and there's still many to come. It ends up being a balancing act, you know I test them out what they look like next to each other, and if they're too colorful tone it down.
Bashiok: One of the things I like about them is, without even looking at your hot bar you can kind of see, oh this one looks blue and cold it's probably an ice spell of some type. So without even mousing over it to see what it is I can tell it's at least of a specific magic or damage type or skill use...
Mike: You know one of the best experiences I've had at Blizzard is the iterative process, which some artists don't like, but I personally love it. Because it lets me test stuff out. For a while I was trying out, ok let's do color theory. ok so all the berserker skills will be this tone, and all the battle master will be this tone. And you know on paper it looked good, sounded good, ok it's a nice theory but what we found is when you put them on the hot bar, if you went down a certain tree now everything's the same color at the bottom and it's hard to tell them apart. You know, ok I get a gold star for being clever, but then I lose points because it's not playable. So you know you go back once again, scrap it, and reevaluate it. But I love that process.
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Bashiok: Very cool, and last but not least you're both working on a system which is the barbarian's fury system. So, the fury system for those that don't know, the barbarian uses a sort of reverse mana system. It's not using mana as it uses abilities, but it builds up as he's fighting, so it kind of. he gets angry and he's chopping dudes down and he gets more and more fury to use for his abilities. But that's actually changed quite a bit, can you guys go over how UI and effects are coming together to create the new fury system?
Mike: Yeah well it's always an, again, an iterative process right, and one of the problems we had with one of the systems we had tried out was it worked but from a peripheral vision you couldn't see what was going on. We wanted to be very clear and very bold about what was being done, so traditionally what happens is design will come to me and we'll talk about what are the goals we need to accomplish. And then I'll do some mockups and then I take it over to Julian and hope he can make those mockups look far better than my mockups.
Julian: And I think where we're at right now with it is the recognition that spending your fury is what we really want you to be doing, we want you to see it as a commodity to spend in order to gain access to more power, and that wasn't really being communicated so clearly with the other one. So we're trying to accomplish that goal of making it more, yeah, you know when to spend, you know what you're spending but you don't necessarily have to look directly at it. So effects plays a little bit of a role there, but I think we're trying to not put effects in there just for effects' sake, but only do it when we think that it's going to help you really read and understand what's going on.
Mike: Yeah, before one of the problems was you would see the build up more than what you had to spend. Like you would build your fury up, and then you know (bonged), and you'd have an amount you could spend. But everything was sharing the same visual space and you couldn't necessarily discern one from the other. And again from an art standpoint, sure it worked, it was ok, but it wasn't conveying the gameplay. And gameplay is king, you've got to make sure that it comes across in every way.
Bashiok: Can you describe for those listening what it currently looks like?
Mike: Let's see. if I had to use a cruel comment, one that I made myself as I was making it, oh "It's the fury traffic light". Because it's three spheres stacked vertically, and no we're not making them three different colors, but you know as I was doing it I was like oh great, it pretty much well assures us that we are not doing different colors because it will well indeed look like a traffic light. But that's the gist of it, because when you're playing hopefully your vision is in the center of the screen, and this is going to be to your right and down below. So you need to see a very bright graphic that kind of flashes to let you know, that even if you flick your eyes down there you'll see I've got two or three of whatever that is to spend. Really that was the goal. Hopefully Julian and his team will ramp it up, so that, because we want it to catch your eye while you're doing it, but not be a distraction.
