Hi again! For clarity, in case anyone is not sure what ending they’ve got and doesn’t mind spoilers, I’ll include here (deep in our convo ahahaha) a little guidance.
**SPOILER WARNING for anyone reading this who has not played through the game and wants it to be spoiler-free when they do! **
The four flashbacks are: 1 in school, 1 in diner, 1 on roof of gas station, and 1 in the house. If you’ve seen flashbacks in all 4 of these locations, there is a particular ending you get. Most would call it the “good” ending. The other ending occurs if you have missed 1 or more flashbacks and most would think of it as a “bad” ending. Haha.
There is one additional secret in the game, a bunker you can access, but it’s got nothing to do w/ the ending or flashbacks.
Good points btw about the UI and the benefits of incl. that as part of general asset packs. For Dead City, we did want to make more use of the custom item menu and generally have a more point+click approach to items in the game itself. Didn’t really feel necessary in the end so we cut it down to what is there.
You are absolutely right that UI/X is underrated as a part of game design. Totally true. I think a big part of the problem is that UI is different from UX (this is poorly understood) and UI artists often are specialists at a particular kind of artistic expression/utility that doesn’t necessarily overlap w/ other forms of game art. And is often less fun for those of us who like drawing creatures, characters, etc. Then UX itself isn’t necessarily part of the expertise of a UI artist so there’s a lot of collaboration that has to be done (or one genius who gets it right and has a vision). At least that’s my take on it.
BUT pixel art actually does overlap beautifully w/ UI art and I think that somehow occurred to a bunch of asset sellers like me all at once a while ago and they all started adding it in.
Where I kinda fall in this is that I was challenged/asked (haha) to make RDC a pack that includes all the elements someone would need to start making an RPGmaker game (sprites, portraits, tiles, battlers and UI) w/o having to buy multiple packs or wait for me to get around to doing more extensive UI stuff.
So I did that and it was fairly painless, espec. if just a reskin, and now I am seeing, partly thanks to feedback like yours, that even if it is a separate pack, it ought to be a thing in every theme I do. So that means UI reskins for RCC and NR will be added eventually or rolled into existing packs.
Anyways. Thanks so much for your time and support. Good luck to you as well!