#27 It's a new logo, it's a new life

Hi folks ! I'm Chloé, and I'm here to tell you all about what we've been up to this week! And let me tell you, there's a lot to share.

A Star is (Almost) Born

We're almost at the finish line with character design! Paul is making great progress, and the character should be completed very soon. The next step will be dressing it up and giving it some hair! Mélissa will be in charge of texturing, while Paul continues preparing the character's animation. Since we want to give you the ability to customize your avatar extensively, there's still some work to be done in that department. We've decided to create a single androgynous, non-gendered character that can be customized in nearly every way, allowing you to create your dream character.

Another brick in the wall

Meanwhile, Jimmy has been focused on modifying the walls. He rewrote the code for generating walls on the fly, adding some new features. Now, it will be possible to create walls of varying heights, even for curved walls. We can already imagine the beautiful castles you'll be able to build!

True colors

This week, Nico worked on the color wheel in the game. We realized its complexity during your VirtualSociety tests at Vandoeuvre-in-Game. From now on, changing the color of game assets will be much simpler! Speaking of color, we noticed a significant loss of detail when integrating Melissa's assets into the game. But with some hard work, they managed to identify the issue. We've changed our approach to creating textures by separating different color shades, and the beautifully painted textures now look much better than before, to our delight. If you want to learn more, we've actually written an article on the topic !

On the road(map) again!

As in previous weeks, Clelie has continued working on our wiki. This time, she focused on other games that are somewhat similar to VirtualSociety, to get a broad view of trends and what's happening in terms of user interface and user experience. She will be responsible for the game's user interface layout, while Melissa will handle the design aspect.

 Logo: Something just like this

Jimmy and Nico have wanted to change the game's logo for a while now, and with the arrival of Melissa and me (Chloe) on the team, we thought it was time. Thanks to Melissa, we've made a decision regarding the game's artistic direction, and we felt the logo should also have a distinctive visual identity. So, I took on the task. I started by creating mood boards, which we debated a lot, but they helped me choose the right direction. We made most of the decisions together, as usual, but when it came to the final logo options, we had a dilemma: Melissa, Paul, and Clelie had a different preference from Jimmy, Nico, and me. The first three preferred the logo with the Earth, while we favored the logo with the little cat. Since Vandoeuvre in Game was approaching, we decided to let people vote at the event. We also conducted polls on Instagram and Twitter, which allowed us to gather your opinions. And by a vast majority, across all platforms, the logo with the Earth won. I'll write an article soon to tell you more about it!

Thanks again for your support, and see you next week!