Re: new style pingu

[Ingo Ruhnke]

Gervase Lam <address@hidden> writes:

> Basically, there would be no problem keeping the GUI itself
> stationary. But have lots of little jokes that Pingus play out in
> the background, like what I described. Probably need to have lots,
> otherwise people would get "bored". Either that or have some of the
> jokes happen much much less often than the others. Even better have
> both options!

Even so jokes would look nice, I don't think that we should have them
or at least we should keep them to the absolute minimum. Since I think
they would be:

1) technically difficult to handle, ClanLib doesn't have any
   video-support, so we would need to save animations as flat .png or
   .jpg which could get quite huge if the animation covers larger
   parts of the screen. Hand optimizing them (by moving them as
   sprites around) would be possible, but quite an ugly thing to do
   and could look ugly in the end (3d gfx vs. 2d movement).

2) not really needed, the player is meant to stay only a few moments
   in the main menu GUI, not for multiple minutes. The GUI should only
   be there to get bring the player into the game, it shouldn't be a
   game in itself.

If we want jokes in the GUI, they should be very simple and small,
tipping with the foot or blinking with the eyes on mouse_over or
something like that, but not having Pingus walk all over the screen
and actually doing things.

The GUI buttons can have animations, but also they shouldn't get too
complicated, something like raising the arms or so is ok, but they
shouldn't dry to tell huge stories.


When we want to tell small stories, then they should be placed into
cutscenes, preferably in in-game gfx or some custom cutscene engine
and they should be there to reward the player for finishing a world,
using them in the GUI would be a waste IMHO.

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