Oh hey, a new blog post! It feels nice to have something to show everyone again. Coincidently, today also marks the 6th month anniversary since Salty Tears started development. Remember when it was going to be done in a month? ME NEITHER.

In any case, today we’re going to be looking at our upgraded in-game UI. We’ve gotten a bit of feedback noting that even with a name in-place, it wasn’t immediately obvious who was saying what. Our solution: After a lot of different drafts, we settled on a speech-bubble type of design. Readability would no longer be an issue, it fit our art style well, and it has a bit more character than a semi-transparent jagged box.

The problem with this, of course, is that you can only do so much with a static speech bubble. Things like moving and flipped sprites would be an issue, which is why we took it a step farther and made it so that we could change where the bubble’s tail leads off.  Finally, we needed a way to identify when Oliver was speaking as well as when it was standard narration. And that is that. We’re happy with what we ended up doing to address the problems our UI had and hope you’ll agree.  We ended up going through 16 variances before we settled on this final design, three of which you can see here.