For as long as I've been slavishly meddling with this project (still only 1/3 as long as the dev time on FFXV), I've been obsessed with getting the pixel fonts just right. This has been...challenging. But recently, after noting that some very helpful and knowledgeable people took issue with tiny, dumb prior resolution, I amended the font and came very close to perfection.
Very close, but not close enough.
That's right. Everything looks pretty sweet except for that tiny bit of overlap between the HP/MP symbol and the numerals. And only at higher levels to boot.
But I hate it.
There are several ways to fix this, though as far as I can tell extending the spacing of the HP/MP boxes is not among them. I can be super lazy and just cut the 'P's' off, like they did in the FF Legend games. This is...not a bad solution, and I probably would have done this if I thought of it initially. I can find or create tiny HP MP icons, which is also a good idea, though I've yet to find anything that works.
Or I can do what I'm currently considering, and redo the whole battle system using portions of Olivia's Octopath Traveler pack. Why would I do something so drastic, you ask? Because I already paid for them.
So, overall it looks pretty cool. I'm not sure if it creates too much empty space or not, I sort of like the austerity of it but maybe so. (Sorry to make you scroll, btw, but I don't want to cut down the image) You'll also notice the extremely sexy and outrageous Turn Order Display is not quite right for the 8-bit aesthetic, though I think it looks good moved into the empty bottom quarter. I feel a little bad for poor Ruin wedged in next to it, but oh well. I suspect there's a way to dummy out the display, and though I've done some murking around in the script, I've yet to be able to. But probably doable.
More challenging would be to revamp it into something a little more retro, which *might* be possible, but I have no idea how to do it. If it is, I would replace the bar with something simpler, and replace the battlers in the display with their overworld sprites (as every SV enemy had a matching sprite). This seems feasible, but I do not have the know-how to even begin to think about knowing how to consider doing this.
So those are my options. As much as it busies up the project, I would like to make us of Olivia's side-view UI, as it is recommended-but-not-required for fuller use of her OTB system. And, as I mentioned, I paid money for it. (An amazing purchase, BTW, heartily recommend it to anyone who uses MV with an extra 20$ lying around).
But I'm open to recommendations/suggestions. The end result could be any combination of what I've mentioned, starting to have second thought about the vertical UI but working to include other of Olivia's elements.
Things have come together quite nicely in the last month, after a year or so of stagnation and roadblocks. After this, I have to continue implementing weapon and spell animations, which is real fml work and gonna go sloooooooooow. Then comes the actual game design part, which between the hell of getting the assets implimented and the GDD I have lying around sounds like a piece of cake. I know I'm wrong about that, but a problem for another day/year/decade.