Round Robin Dev Log: Bird Tracks and Bad Ideas

Hey, storytellers! Round Robin spent this week getting a more fitting home for the stories you will inevitably blame on your friends.

We have new interface artwork, an ending-screen design, and a finished Robin Hood art pass to show you. Behind those images, work continues on the lobby, the next test build, and bringing the art and sound together.

For anyone joining us here: Round Robin is the Write Warz mode where each person gets up to 100 characters at a time to help build one shared story. Later rounds let several players write in different places at once. That makes finding your spot on the page rather important. So does noticing what your friends have done to the plot while you were looking away.

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A proper page for an improper story

This week's Round Robin interface artwork. Sample story text and names are part of the layout preview; this is not a gameplay capture.

The new layout brings the story onto a broad sheet of parchment, with the players gathered along the bottom and a separate space for emotes. We checked the design with all six player positions visible so the portraits, names, and reactions have room to breathe.

Small bird tracks work their way into the design, too. They are a lovely detail for a mode named Round Robin. We have also discussed having a few tracks appear occasionally, although that animation is still an idea rather than a finished feature.

Your turn. Everyone is watching.

The new "You're up!" handoff artwork, prepared ahead of integration into the mode.

The turn handoff has its own new artwork, putting the bird portrait and player name right in front of you when it is time to write. Around that moment, we are working on making the writing and next-player indicators easy to follow.

Our follow-up test at the end of last Friday left us with specific things to check, including names appearing beneath the correct bird and a problem at the end of the game. A new internal build arrived on Monday to address that feedback. Those are the kinds of details we want to keep testing as the new presentation goes in.

Big reactions need a little elbow room

A short clip from our October 30 follow-up test, showing reactions on the earlier prototype interface. The new artwork above is being prepared for integration.

Emotes can get enthusiastic very quickly. This week we worked through how to give them a useful home without crowding the player row or squeezing the story.

For smaller screens, we are exploring a compact selection that you can page through with arrows, showing a few emotes at a time. A layout that works on a large display still needs to make sense on the phone in your hand, so that mobile arrangement remains part of the design work.

Keep the evidence

The new Round Robin ending-screen artwork, with planned story-saving and sharing controls. Design preview before integration.

Once everybody has finished contributing, you ought to be able to keep the result. The ending-screen design puts the story on a writing desk, with parchment, a feather, and a central place to save it or copy it as an image.

We kept the treatment close to the rest of the mode so the ending feels like the last page of the same story. The controls shown here are part of the new design; getting that screen connected to the game is part of the work ahead.

Robin Hood has suspiciously good taste in hats

The completed Robin Hood character art pass, shared this week. In-game integration is still to come.

The Robin Hood idea now has its color and shadow pass: a little green hat, a bow, a nest full of coins, and a wanted poster that does very little to establish innocence.

This started with a bird pun. It has become one of our favorite pieces of character art for the update. We are looking forward to seeing this tiny outlaw take responsibility for somebody's terrible sentence.

What comes next

Round Robin's lobby setup is still in progress and has taken more work than we first expected. After that, the next step is bringing in the new art and sounds, then testing the whole flow together: joining, taking turns, reaching the ending, and getting everyone through a complete story.

If you want to follow the rebuild or give us an opening sentence to test with, join the Write Warz Discord. We are always interested in a line that gives the next writer just enough room to make a questionable decision.

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