Deathbed

I decided I didn't like my dialog boxes and well... one thing lead to another.



New Dialog Boxes
Are completely overhauled. The NPC name/position and tiny-face are removed entirely. The text box has been re-positioned and a slight face graphic has been added in it's place. This means the NPC's T-section of their face is visible in a horizontal window, but not their forehead or mouth. This limited scope will make designing NPC faces a breeze. This will require a self-built face maker at a later stage, but not there yet.

Likewise, the same effect has been applied to the player box with reposition. The player choices have been dropped from up to 8 options down to 5 options. Instead of using numbers to select an option, the selection highlight process players of RPG's are familiar with has been returned (though fully custom) so that custom game controls will be more intuitive in dialog scenes.

With this redesign, I created a different border. One I liked so much I made 5 similar version in various colors. All of this brightens up the game, which is aligned with the more cartoon-type graphics I've already applied to character sprites and some of the mapping.

Battle System
Heck, while I'm at it, why not replace the neat, but now unfitting, battle window design? After all, I had only made a rough draft to begin with and it certainly doesn't fit well with the new art design. Since I'm not at battle implementation yet, I did only a basic layout for now - which looks hella sharper. This, like the other frame redesigns, is housed in a single gimp file over multiple layers for future edits.

But Wait, There's More!
If I have 5 colors of window frames which are applied to the battle screen and the dialog windows that means... yup, redesign of the menu frames. This seemed like a no-brainer because I already had 3 versions of menu frame which could be changed from the options menu. Why not unify the frames across the game and make it customizable to have 5 different frames now? Seems easy enough. Right?

Well I did this. It looks good. Just one issue - the color scheme didn't quite align with the internal menu images. Aaaand, just fixing menu background images wasn't sufficient to fix this. In fact, I'm still in the process of updating HUNDREDS of menu images to the more high-contrast theme.

This change is absolutely worth the time sink as the menu text has been criticized as being too close in color to the background, making it difficult to read. Well, not any more. At least, not nearly as bad as before. And while I've been making these subtle improvements I've also fixed some graphic design laziness from the past, improved health and energy bar readings, improved header colors (like items), and taken the time to improve some bigger things by making them smaller.



Bigger Things Smaller
The original menu bestiary had 8 different pages for the different enemy types. Each page had a single column for enemy names, and a HUGE box to put enemy graphics. They each also had large description boxes. The idea of filling all these custom images in was... daunting. Well, not so much now.

The bestiary is now 2 pages: Enemies, Abominations. You guessed it, abominations are bosses or special creatures. Each page has been expanded to 4 columns to fit 100% of enemies on 1 page and bosses/uniques on another. Much less jumping around for enemy information. Each page will be alphabetical for discovery and instead of a giant enemy picture window, a much smaller one has been added where the battle sprite image will fit nicely - negating any need to create two types of images for each enemy.


Work in progress, obviously.

Below the enemy image is a short list of useful information about the enemy, such as strength and weaknesses. However, the facts are slowly uncovered through battles to uncover more knowledge about them. In battle the player can also use turns to SCAN - gaining more knowledge about an enemy sooner, to fill out the bestiary faster. However, a single battle or a couple scans will not reveal everything about an enemy. Revealing will happen based on a progress bar which will unveil information at different percentages. Fighting a battle provides a small percentage gain, while scanning is a larger gain, but each will have a randomized gain within a set limit - this will be the case for all enemies.

Abominations will show information based on discovered lore instead of scanning, since they will be one-off battles (unless you lose.)

So, To Summarize?

- Simplified bestiary and future workload. Rebuilt this menu from scratch.
- Unified dialog, battle and menu frames.
- New frame graphics with 5 options to choose from that can be changed any time.
- Menu system recolor to improve ease of reading, contrast, and graphic appeal.
- Improving menu item headers. Work in progress.
- Merit Matrix color enhancement for improved visual appeal.
- Recent tutorial menu images with varying colors for word highlights standardized.
- HUNDREDS of images recolored, improved, reformatted, and reuploaded for cohesion.
- LOVE my newly implemented music & system. Fixed a bug preventing the track from automatically going to the next song when the song finishes.