Endgame GUI- sneak peeks

Hey everyone! Spent some time working on GUI mock-ups for Endgame. I actually did a full mock up for the UI - but while I do think parts of it were eye catching, somehow it just wasn't working for me. I'm not sure why. There are parts I like and parts I dislike even though a lot of the elements ended up similar in function and overall design.

Anyway, this is a quick sneak peek at both the designs - both have parts I do and do not like. But there they are! 

Above is the dialogue box + main character placement. The circles on the left are the quick mention and the little flag with the button name pops out when hovering the mouse. I noticed a lot of people in Changeling would accidentally hit the buttons on the bottom so I'm hoping moving them to the side will make it a less common occurrence. In addition, having a more obvious change between the inactive button state and hover state will hopefully help people notice they are hovering and might accidentally click.

This is design 2 - and this is the screen where they are most similar. I really just changed up the detail work a bit around the "say screen" (aka "dialogue box"). I'm using a slightly different font in the his one as well.

Also, several people complained the text in Changeling was too small. Though it was a comfortable size for me, I'm intend to make it a bit bigger in Endgame. 

(You'll notice the placeholder images I'm using are for Changeling since I don't really have any imagery from Endgame to use yet - aside from the MC's sprite. So that's why I'm using Solis Court. LoL. I just had this BG on hand.)

Still intend to use the pop up side menu with additional options since I just like that set up in general. 

You can see I'm using a different "choice indicator" for this design. 

Here we have the choice boxes. I made them a bit longer than Changeling as we sometimes had difficulty fitting the full choice in the box and had to watch our word count for them.

White circle is the choice the player is hovering over, black is inactive. And the gray one with the lock is a choice locked due to personality preferences or some earlier decision that failed to open up that scenario to the player.

You also get a look at the lower left without the MC's sprite.

And here is design 2 :

This time around, I decided to add relationship meters, as people found Changeling's choice structure so complex they couldn't always gauge whether they were making the right choices or not. I didn't really want to do an in-game indicator of right/wrong choices especially since some people don't want that and I'd need to make it optional.... 

Having relationship meters lets the player check how they're doing without worrying about some kind of indicator. It will also let the player see how their personality choices affect different love interests.  But if a person wants to ignore the meters- they can play without checking that screen at all.
(the background of this screen wouldn't necessarily stay the same. I would use a background from the game - whichever one seems to look the best.)

 Initially I was going to try to integrate personality selection into the game, but I think I've settled on letting the player choose it outright. Since there's already a customization screen for appearance, it makes more sense to let that flow into choosing personality traits. There are only three sets to choose from anyway.  

What I didn't like about design 1 was how empty this screen was. There was too much text to fit all three on one screen, but it looks kind of empty with just one on there.

Design 2 fixes that problem since there is more border detailing. And I divided things up vertically rather than horizontally. If I go with design 1, I'll probably try to reorganize it similarly.

This one is fairly obvious. Haha. These are the current colors I have mapped out for the MC but they may change. I'm currently going to stick with just the hair and skin.  

I decided that it made more sense to put the name in-put on this screen as well.  Helps keep all the customization together.

And design 2 is pretty similar. It's another screen where I kept the same concept and layout, but changed up the design elements.

CG gallery...fairly straight forward.

Design 2 forced me to swap which side names were on due to the circle design on the left making the names difficult to read.

 More save slots than Changeling since I noticed people used them up really, really fast... 

Design 2 is...more or less the same. Just swapped again.

 And...a fairly standard options/settings menu. 

I did a slight redesign of this page because I was considering trying to clean up this concept and make it look nicer while keeping the overall look and color scheme. Made the border a little more interesting, swapped out the standard sliders for something a little prettier, and added some borders around the buttons so they stand out more.

(And yes, we are contemplating having love scenes in Endgame - possibly as a Kickstarter stretch goal. Since I'd like to allow this content to be optional, I wanted to include space for that on the settings screen).

I liked the above clean up of my original concept but it still just wasn't feeling *there* so that's what prompted me to try to scrap what I was doing above and try something else. In the end, what I turned out is still similar...yet quite different. I wanted to do something without frames and maybe a little more futuristic.

Apparently my brain thinks in frames. =w=; Even so, it definitely has a much different feel to it. I don't know about "futuristic" but it is quite different. LoL

And a potential main menu mock-up. Design 1 (yes, the title is different. I have still been contemplating titles, and am considering dropping "Endgame" entirely. Still haven't made up my mind. But I was trying out different ones to see how they look.)

And design 2 which is, again, really similar. Mostly, I think this design has a cleaner, more elegant feel to it.

Design 1 has a lot of inconsistencies in button and button placement as I was trying out different things and hadn't made up my mind how I wanted certain indicators and things to look. Design 2 is more cohesive from that stand point.  If we end up using the first concept, I'll have to fix those things and tidy it up a bit.

But, anyway, this is currently where the GUI is heading. Unless I pay someone else to start from scratch. LoL.

This is probably a monster post due to all the images, but I hope you guys enjoy looking through it!