[Background Blog] The UI Development of BEEK

Hello everyone, Compymono back for the next Patreon update! I wanted to get this one out a few days ago but as you may expect I've had my hands full with various things. (i.e. Carmacks and the recent updates to BEEK itself with Japanese, German, and French languages being added.)

(On that note, with BEEK's upcoming release on itch.io, I'll see if I can get some download codes out to our wonderful Welcome Home tier backers, just give me some time to see if I can make that happen.)

In the beginning...

So as mentioned in our previous blog posts, BEEK went into production around the end of 2018 and was worked on throughout 2019. My personal involvement on the project started in around May when the game's script was complete and being translated, where I helped out with the English version.

During this time the development of the game itself ran into some difficulties getting to release quality so I moved into working on the game itself in order to improve things.

As I'm predominantly a graphic designer, my first point to tackle was the appearance of the game. 

Now I remember my biggest issues with the design of the UI at this point was:

• It was too empty, it felt like it was trying too hard to be a app devoid of personality rather than a game that was something interesting to look at over the hours you'll be talking to BEEK.
• There was no animation or flow between the different menus so they would just appear and disappear between frames.
• A lack of sound effects made the game feel empty and the player interactions not as fun as they should be. *click click click*

So the first thing I tackled was the appearance of the message bubbles, players will be looking at these elements the most while they play the game after all. The idea was to give a bit of texture to the bubbles around the edges, you'll see it in the final game if you look closely.

After this I started to bring the gradient textures from the message bubbles into the other UI elements and replaced the font from the default Arial to Nunito Sans to help things feel a lot more unique.

Next was the working out what to do with the buttons around the bottom of the screen. 

You might also notice the album button and CG locks seen in the album itself have paw prints hidden in them to add a cute touch.

Above you can see the working document in Illustrator for all of the buttons found in the final game along with the build from around this time. I also was trying to add more texture to the background of the message area with a cross-stitch pattern which you'll see changed in the final game. Around this time lots of animation improvements were being put in place as well, like the slide animations for the menus and choice selections. (I'll attach a video to the post showing an animation if you're really curious but once I finished with it at this point it was basically the same as the final game)

Above you can see some of the development of the settings menu. Since this was our first project launching as Studio Klondike, I wanted to feed some traffic to our social media pages and make it as easy as possible for people to reach out to us. The third image above is "oh crap I forgot we had another button here that only unlocks when you beat the game".

In the final game, we added both an achievements button and the help menu in the final month or so before release. I had to be a little creative with these buttons but I think they turned out well. (My latest challenges on this front was working out where to put the quit button on the itch.io desktop version and the response pause button in the previous patch which eventually found a space on the player's response menu itself)

It was a challenge for the game's language switching system but I'm glad we ended up putting the help menu in there for the final game. I couldn't imagine the number of extra support emails it's saved us at this point. Putting manuals in your game is cool folks!

Above is an earlier version of the album menu from before both the locks were added on the locked CG's and before the pre-baked CG blurs were added in the second patch for the game. At this point the blurring of the CG's was handled by a simple gaussian blur shader applied on a layer above the full CG's. It was way too performance heavy for older iOS and Android devices. 

We even ran into some weird bugs with this version of the CG menu like seen above on older devices. 

On the left you can see a general comparison to the game at an earlier stage versus the current released version of the game. Another thing you might notice is the lack of a decision timer. In the original design of Beek, the game would progress onwards regardless of what the player would do, if they had the game open, or if it was a really inconvenient time of night. About a month or two out of release we assessed that this solution was not going to work well at all in practice, however it was too late to re-assemble the system into one that would preference the player's awake hours.

So our compromise was to push the default decision (no response) timers out by 24 hours and let the player come back to the game whenever they wanted to make the next decision. (Well except if the time to make said decision is under 30 seconds, then the old behaviour actually takes precedence and you can miss stuff, usually in tense situations where the player is expected to be actively playing anyway) However, we still had a lot of content locked behind the idea that the player can refuse to respond at points throughout the story— no good endings thankfully—so we still needed a way for the player to access this content, including to get some of the achievements. This is where the response timer bar was born! I'm not sure if everyone found this, but you can press down on the response timer bar itself to fast forward you skipping the response.

The pause button was added in the second latest patch since we assessed that the biggest and easiest complaint from our players to fix was that the fact a lot of people didn't have enough time to read the messages sent by Beek in time to respond, particularly when they had just opened the app after a while and Beek's been on a texting rampage. I hope the improvement helps the experience of playing the game for a lot of players.

Now, I could keep on talking about a heap of little touches and changes made after this point in the UI during the polish stage, such as the tap to zoom messages on the CG view, the hidden Easter eggs for Astatos and Carmacks added in the days before release, or the Taptic Engine feedback and sound design for the UI elements but lets start wrapping this up.

And that's where we are today, with Beek released in 6 languages across iOS, Android, and as of today PC! (Even if it's really just a bonus port) Hopefully this blog was interesting to some of you, or at least just cool to see some early screenshots of the game.

I would've liked to show some more comprehensive steps of the real early stuff but I didn't have any screenshots of back then on hand and a lot of the old builds of the game form early 2019 don't really work very well. 

Oh, and for players who have finished the true ending of the game, they'll know there's some UI I didn't touch on at all here. I'll be sure to get to that at some point in the future but lets save the spoilers for another post in the future, since I've been talking in this one for long enough as it is. Wait you're telling me I didn't even have time to talk about the logo design for all six languages and our marketing materials! ...Guess there still really is a lot to talk about!

Anyway, thanks heaps for reading, it's been a lot of work to get Beek this far and I'm really excited for when I get to show off our next project that I've been working on!

- Compymono