GUI Color Change in Response to Game State

[z99-_]

So, I've seen a few hints at the new GUI, and it looks really cool! I noticed there appears to be a color scheme going on, with blue appearing to dominate (I wonder who designed that ). This is fine for me, but as I looked at it, I thought "I wonder what it would look like if the blue changed to orange?" followed by "it could look pretty cool, but it might give the impression that the AI is extra angry or something" followed by "The GUI should change colors based off of AIP (or other game changes)!".

You could have a smooth color gradient from blue to deep red based off of AIP, maybe have it switch to violet when an exo is launched or some other big event happens, have it switch to dark grey when the player loses - tons of possibilities! I think it could really increase immersion and information dissemination, by providing constant and clear, but at the same time subtle, information about what's going on in the game, without needing additional text. No longer will a player lose because they had a lot going on and didn't notice the exo spawn. Similarly, no longer will a player be able to escape the constant feeling of dread that a high AIP should bring >D. And you could presumably make it available to modders who could do a bunch of other cool things with it!

Anyways, just a thought I had and wanted to share. I have no idea how much extra work it would entail, but done right I think it could really add to the game, in a unique way that games often don't think about.

[x4000]

Neat idea!  I'm not sure how feasible it would be, mainly because that means that any art has to be duplicated multiple times, but in theory we might be able to do simple hue shifts on the non-icon-oriented parts of the GUI in order to accomplish this without a ton of work.  Thinking about that sort of thing from the start (and thus designing it in from day 1) would definitely make it a lot easier to do rather than having to retrofit it in, so that's a great other reason for having folks in this early -- what would be daunting is instead something entirely possible.

I think that if we kept it purely to the one set of art, and did hue shifts on it, then we'd be on to something viable here.  That keeps it in the domain of coding, which makes it not take extra time for every piece of GUI art we ever do in the future after that point.

I definitely think the idea has promise!

[z99-_]

Cool! Glad you like it

Just noticed this is Trello Official that's when you know you made it big!

[x4000]

 

[Taichikitty]

if you are going to have color/hue shifting text, then you should have an outline, likely black, around the text so that it doesn't matter what the background color is; the text will still be legible.

Typical UI practices
1) Make sure your text fields have enough length for the languages you are localizing in.  Pseudolooc is the extreme, and makes sure you support unicode.  German is touted as the longest, but French sometimes has some surprises.

2) You need an ellipsing strategy in case a single line text field does get overloaded.  Are you going to just truncate the last few characters and put in "...", or something else?

3) You also need to know if you have to deal with different font sizes.  Making text larger is a common accessiblity feature for people with vision problems of one sort or another...or just tired eyes.

[Atepa]

On the note of accessibility a option to disable the shifting as well would probably be of benefit, for those with specific color blindness issues.