Posted April 21, 2025 by EsoDev
Hey, how are you? Did you celebrate the day our lord and saviour, Mithras, was reborn from the cosmic chocolate egg of the primordial bnnuy? I personally consumed a whole ten egg over the last few days. Honestly, what happened a week ago still bothers me, but I've been managing it. So, let's talk updates.
Last week, I mostly worked on redesigning some things and laying the groundwork for the new UI. This continued into this week. I went over a few UI designs before settling on one I enjoy. Though it's not just about a new UI, it's also about finally fixing issues with how the UI was made to begin with.
So:
1) The UI is now entirely abstracted through a series of extensions, meaning that if any change needs to be made to any element, the changes will propagate throughout the game. For example, if I decide I don't like the squishy buttons, I can change the button-generating code, and the entire game will respect the change. The idea is to remove bespoke UI/HTML work in favour of abstract constructions. Something that started being a bit of a problem at some point.
2) The UI now has a new look, vaguely inspired by some elements of neumorphism, but with my own twists. I think it tonally fits the game much better than the previous UI, even if it's a bit strange not to see the old UI anymore.
3) The UI is now colourable. While I laid the groundwork for visual themes and custom colour schemes a long time ago, it was unfeasible to implement them with the old bespoke UI in any way that made sense. So now that we have a new UI, we also have a return of the colouring. Right now it can be set through a config file, but the whole system is built to allow defining custom colour schemes and swapping between them on the fly.
Here's the new UI in the old colour scheme:
Here's the new UI in an example alternate colour scheme (note that even the logo obeys the change):
Here's the new UI showcasing colour mapping (it's not supposed to be viewed this way):
Next, we're using this new UI to implement the character creator according to the changes discussed on Discord. I won't go over them here, at least not until I can show them off in-engine.