Friday Update #8 (GUI Overhaul and Zoey Male Uniform) (Patreon)

Edit 01/12/2021: I enabled the cleavage for the ripped uniform since I forgot, the chest variation of the uniform is now in pose c (with the hand on the chin), and all poses now have proper tie layering.

Hey all, sorry for the delay in getting this up. I've been spending 12 hours a day on the game trying to get something ready to present here.

1. GUI Overhaul

As a project that started out with almost the entirety of Student Transfer's 4.0 engine, re:Dreamer inherited Student Transfer's GUI.

It's gotten some overhauls already (the 1920x1080 resolution rework and the phone system in particular come to mind) but it's still largely the same as Student Transfer's.

The new GUI I've been working on is a significant departure from the highly functional but aesthetically boring Student Transfer GUI.

Ladies and gentlemen (and everyone in-between), the new re:Dreamer GUI launching in 0.6.0.

Right away, the biggest change is the textbox. It now reaches to the left and right of the screen and gives much more space for, well, everything.

The box itself has a nice cyan to pink gradient with a subtle black triangle geometric overlay, and it has a bright border at the top to separate it from the game window.

The textbox defaults to 80% opacity, but the settings menu features a slider bar to adjust that from anywhere to full opacity to full transparency.

The other thing of note with the graphics is the name box, which is styled after the rounded corners of modern iOS messaging apps.

If you'll ignore Ai's attempts to summon a demon, you'll see that it changes color based on the speaker.

Zach/Zoey has a unique gradient outline similar to the textbox around his/her name. After all, he/she is the main character, so it only makes sense that he/she gets a little bit more flair to show when he/she is speaking.

You may have noticed that the font is different from Student Transfer's Ubuntu. Replacing it is Gilroy. It's a modern sans serif with a focus on geometric consistency (similar to the fairly commonplace Century Gothic). The character spacing is a bit rounder than something like the Neue Helvetica, which is the default iOS font, but I really like the way Gilroy works in conjunction with the quickbar elements.

Speaking of the quickbar, that still needs to be reworked to be in line with what you would see from a typical modern Japanese visual novel. The text buttons are functional but very boring, and more stylized buttons running over the far right of the textbox would provide a much needed bit of subtle flair to the user interface.

Overall, there are only a few GUI elements that I want to add, such as a small animated caret at the end of a finished text line to indicate that the line is finished (it'll be a rotating Mars male symbol that transforms back and forth into a Venus female symbol while rotating, and the 3D Blender models for both have already been made).

The other planned noticeable change would be the title screen. It's a rather boring menu box, and I want the sort of GUI you might see on a modern phone, particularly the main base screen of a mobage gacha. I need to settle on a design but something like Girls Frontline or Azur Lane would be the ideal to shoot for. Also, we need to commission new art for the title screen, but that's lower on the priority list for now.

2. Zoey Male Uniform

Speaking of commissioned art, TiltSHIFT has gotten back to us with the sprites for Zoey's male uniform.

Once again, he's knocked it out of the park. I actually gasped a bit when I saw this art because he perfectly managed to emphasize her princelike appearance (like Sakuya Shirase's). I was struggling a bit with how I was going to depict why people of both sexes can look at this crossdressing woman and think "damn, he's cute as fuck", but after seeing this, those fears are unfounded, because the art speaks for itself better than I would be able to.

We've asked TiltSHIFT to prioritize expressions so Zoey's new sprites can make their debut into the game, so please look forwards to that.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see everyone Friday with the new Britney update!