UI Rework (and Progress) (Patreon)

Greetings! I’m still trying to finish up the boss fights for 10.1, but I took a slight detour this week to give the game’s UI a bit of a facelift. I’ll have a little more to say about the boss fights toward the end, but for now let’s talk about the game’s (slightly) new look.

UI Changes

The revamp is pretty minor. To avoid keeping you in suspense, here’s some shots of the new UI in action:

Just in case you can’t tell, the changes are:

• Windows have a changed color, slightly reduced size and a small decorative element
• Icons are different, and they way they’re used generally makes more sense
• Characters only have 2 resource bars

The icon stuff was by far the most time consuming - I’m still finishing up some work on it, actually. But the icon stuff relates most directly to why I decided to start this little revamp in the first place.

Motivation

Why work on the UI? The overarching reason is because it looks very “generic RPG Maker” and that probably puts a lot of people off. The more immediate reason, though, is because of changes to the UI introduced by gems and enchants.

In order to get gems and enchants working, I had to change the item screen to this:

The big, blocky image looks pretty bad, and every item has a similarly ugly picture. It’s obviously something that shouldn’t be there, and yet there it is. Here’s what it looks like now:

Much better, right? Well, the original, horrid images were just poorly-scaled versions of the game’s icon set. And since I was fixing the big pictures, this seemed like a good opportunity to fix the small ones, too.

Icon Changes

I’ve never liked RMMV’s default icons. The flat, “Windows 8” look just doesn’t go well with fantasy games, IMO, and I’ve long wanted to change it. I recently bought some icon assets, and between those and the icons I’ve managed to frankenstein together, I think it looks pretty good overall.

The first change for icons is that there’s a lot more of them. I reused icons for a lot of things, and I think that made the game feel a little cheap and less immersive. Not everything has a unique icon, but in general icons are reused much less.

The second change is that there’s a more consistent design language between icons and the things they’re supposed to represent. Before, icon shapes were all the same, and colors weren’t used in a consistent way. The most striking example was with states - which probably contributed to why some people found them confusing. Some states were yellow, others blue, and some were green - all this color, and yet none of them tell you whether a state is good or bad, what type of state it is, or, well - anything.

States now have a unique icon shape, which differentiates them from items and such. They also have two distinct background colors, which quickly tells you whether it’s (generally) good or bad.

Bad states:

Good states:

It’s kind of the same thing with abilities. All abilities now have a black background:

Background color now has a meaning with items and armor, too. Lesser ones have a grey background, while “better” items have a blue one. (I might make a purple one eventually for even better items.)

This is (Probably) the Last Major UI Change

Longtime supporters know I’ve wanted to revamp the game’s UI for quite a while. I even produced a number of mockups showing different UIs I was considering, like the following:

As I started looking at it more seriously, though, I discovered a few problems. The biggest one is that the game screen is very small - 816 x 624 pixels - and that means your UI has to be really compact and efficient. There simply isn’t room to add tons of decorative elements everywhere and still have your players be able to quickly parse the information they need. The stock UI is boring, but it’s actually really well optimized for small screen sizes. It has everything you need and nothing you don’t.

The other issue is that this game involves a lot of reading, and a screen full of decorative elements would probably distract from the text. If there’s a bunch of bling around every paragraph, you’re probably not going to pay as much attention to what it actually says. For a story-driven game like this, that’s a big problem.

So, I decided to just do a fairly small tweak to the UI. It keeps all the advantages of the stock UI, and looks less generic while doing it. Those UI mockups I did are interesting, but there just isn’t enough screen space to make them work.

Other 10.1 Progress

Aside from the UI stuff (which is nearly finished) I’m continuing work on boss fights for the arena. The original plan was to make 1 unique boss fight, with the remainder being reskins of previous fights. I eventually concluded the “reskin” idea was a bad one, so I’m making 4 unique boss fights. The most complex one is nearly finished, I just need to tune the difficulty.

Now, these boss fights probably aren’t going to be my best, most interesting work, but they should still be fun. I decided I basically had to create unique fights, but still didn’t want to spend a ton of time making them, since they’re optional content with no particular story relevance. Two of them will involve small minigame elements (in one you have to occasionally chase the boss, while in another you have to occasionally run from him,) but they shouldn’t take that long to develop.

Other than that, I have to write a few scenes and some dialogue (all related to the arena) and the release will be done.

Conclusion

As you’ve probably gathered, the release won’t be out today. I apologize for that, but I fully expect it to be out next month, and then I can get started on 10.2, which will be an H-scene. The poll will be up after 10.1 is released. Please let me know what you think of the UI changes, and thank you for your support!