Hey everyone! these last few days I've been diving into the wonderful world of UI design, working on improving the interface experience in A Very Full House. Today I thought I'd share with you some of that work, along with my thought process and what I'm hoping to achieve here.

So, let's jump right into it! A huge chunk of AVFH involves clicking through menus, and that means how those menus feel is an important part of how the entire experience feels. Right now menu buttons are all boring grey rectangles with some text (and some requirement glyphs for things like Arousal, Corruption, etc.). That's functional, but not exactly inspiring. My first step was redesigning the actual button art.

Here's a new basic button. The transparent background makes sure any interesting art behind it can still be seen, and the outlined white text guarantees contrast on any background so it's easy to read. Hovering over the button highlights it, while a disabled button is both darkened, desaturated, and blurred. Overall, it feels pretty similar to the current system, but a little sharper.

My goal is to use these buttons to deliver more information to the player than the old versions could do with just text. To do that menu options can have "accents" given to them, which attaches some extra art to the button. Here's what a button with the "arousal" accent looks like:

I'm currently planning to have accents for: arousal, control, chores, and money. That should help players find which options complete chores, which ones you can expect to generate arousal, which ones generate control, and so on. It also means I don't have to be as explicit with some mechanics. Eg. instead of "*Tease him*" I can use something more interesting like "*Pay extra close attention to him*" and be confident that the player is still getting the same information. All of these accents will be mutually exclusive and located on the right side of the button.

On the left side of the button I'll be putting accents for mechanical effects the button will have. Right now I'm planning for that to be: change location, time advances, and day advances. Here's an example for what that will look like:

A button can have left and right accents at the same time, which I expect to come up a fair bit of the time.

There's one more element that I'm going to be taking advantage for the button art: the colour ring. The previous examples have the default grey ring, which I'll be using for most actions. For actions that lead to a corruption tag you haven't yet collected, the colour ring will be set to gold instead.

It's a subtle effect, but it should make it a lot clearer when an option leads to some type of interesting game progression. I'm also planning to use the ring to show menu options that have been selected before, perhaps with a duller grey, but I haven't implemented that functionality yet.

All of that - plus work on the text bubbles, which I'll talk about another time - leads us to this before/after comparison:

All of this UI stuff is subject to change - I've made everything as modular as possible so it's easy to change and update elements in the future. I expect I'll be tweaking things for a while until we've dialed into an optimal set of aesthetic and functional art!

Now this post has gone on long enough, and I still have some aspect art to work on, so I'll wrap this up. I'll be back in a few days with some accessory art, and maybe some polls to have you vote on what else my supporters would like to see added!

I'm a couple of days into work on v0.30, and I've already gotten myself side tracked - but I promise it's for a good reason! One of the major features I'm working on are themed menu buttons, and while I was doing some document reading for that I stumbled across a new Ren'py feature: speech bubbles! Toggling from the default text behavior to the new speech bubble behavior looked super quick, so I thought I'd turn it on and see how it looked.

Well, I think it looks great! Here are some screenshots using the default assets (which I will absolutely be replacing with something more thematic):

The usual "say" window at the bottom of the screen is still supported and used for narration. I think the speech bubbles do a fantastic job visually separating narration and dialogue, makes it immediately clear who's talking. It also lends itself to having it animated, which looks pretty slick in play. [I was going to include a video, but SubStar doesn't seem to be enjoying mp4's at the moment and I've spent 20 minutes fiddling with it. You'll just have to trust me; it looks good.]

Now that that system is looking good, I'll be getting back to the original project: menu buttons. While I'm at it, I'll be doing other UI art to try and keep everything thematically tied together. Things are going pretty smoothly so far, so I should have some UI previews for you in a couple of days! I'll also be sketching up some potential accessory options and putting that to a poll for my supporters, so stay tuned for that!

That's all for now, be back soon!