Alright guys. I'm making an online trading card game called Forgotten Lore. It'll be releasing as Early Access on Steam in a few days and so I've been doing my best to make the main menu not absolute trash.
What are your opinions, how can I make it better?
This is the options screen. I'm using a custom shader I wrote to get one of the card portrait's to look the way it does, and can apply it to other pictures.
Hi email me at [email protected] I've got lost of ideas
>>271395
Just post here? I'm looking for feedback and tips, not to hire an artist.
>>271398
1. Tell me youre actually not releasing that "thing" on steam.
2. You do need an artist.
3. I wonder when programers will learn that they have no clue about design...
>>271405
read this, OP
>>271393
Yeah that looks terrible. The layout is fine but everything else has to go.
1. The font for the buttons is awful. I know what type of feeling you're going for but it's just too much. It scales really badly (see the small "options" text and tell me that looks good)
Try picking something more conservative. Also, the text should never go outside of the buttons.
2. The button tabs at the top don't look like buttons. The save button looks really ugly and the black text isn't helping.
3. The background is just awful. Looks like what you get when you put too many filters on an image.
4. Yellow border, black background.... *pukes*
Really, the only good thing I have to say about it is that the fire-y effect at the bottom looks decent. It has no consistency though. is wind coming from the left? Is there no wind? Why are some embers going straight up while the smaller ones go from left to right?
Honestly, I'd say just hire someone or find a volunteer to do the job.
>>271405
I do have artists, but so far I've been keeping them in the actual game. None of them have had a chance to tackle the main menu. It's releasing as early access so I figure the menu can be lacking a bit at launch.
I know the menu is shit, that's why I'm gathering feedback.
>>271414
What fonts would you recommend? Do you think the image would be alright if the texture was just a solid color? What else could I do with the borders and panel backgrounds, should they be a texture or just a different flat color?
Taking another crack at it this morning.
I changed the fonts, so now there are only two on the screen at once. "title" and "text." Tried to make the button tabs look more like buttons. Background is changed. Changed the colors of backgrounds and borders a little.
Thoughts?
>>271517
Oh, also changed the path of the flare particles, since that anon mentioned it was inconsistent for them to go different directions. Also changed some button ordering.
I'm thinking that it might be alright if I just keep the background without the image. Not sure if that leaves to much negative space or not. Most of the menus cover the whole thing anyways.
>>271525
There's a lot wrong here, but you absolutely need to change the colour of those borders.
>>271534
You could try being helpful and tell me exactly what is wrong. And what colors would you recommend?
>>271537
I'm too tired to go through the entire thing, but the border shouldn't really have much colour at all.
You can go with a very subdued and dark red hue, or something.
>>271540
Darker red looks kind of tacky, not too sure about the darker gold either though.
Working some more on it. Changed up some buttons, a little color work.
This is what the main menu looks like (instead of the options screen)
>>271557
And here's the deck builder.
Any opinions on any of these screens? I'm not really happy with the news section (it's actually an html renderer of this page: http://steam.forgotten-lore.com/news/)
get some better fonts for the sidebar, and maybe make the colors on the right more muted.
>>271558
Where ever your cards go or move they shouldn't be hindering the view of the ui elements, i.e the stuffs at the top/bottom bar..
Another update of the menu. Thoughts so far?
>>271678
Looks better but still ugly.
Still not a fan of the font for the top bar. The buttons there should either be larger or the text should be smaller. (thus, making it unreadable, so go for larger buttons) Also, the border is too thick and looks ugly.
In general, I think you give text too little space. Titles and shit need some space. Examples: The top menu, the news post title, the friends list, the stats button, the gold amount, your own username, the icons in the bottom bar (including the text "forgotten lore"). All of these need better spacing and more empty space around them.
To make things look like a button add a slight gradient to it, then remove or invert that gradient on hover, making it look like it's "pressed down". (this is just a really basic way of doing it and will probably look ugly too, but at least it's better than what you have)
The friends list colors look ugly. The green and yellow has to go. I assume it's indicating the online status of your friends. Instead of having everything green/yellow, just add a small green circle somewhere (indicating the status) and some text. Something like "O Online", "O Busy" where the O is a colored circle.
Also, add some whitespace between the friends in the list. Maybe even add a thin line inbetween each friend.
Changelog looks a lot better than before. I would change the ugly cyan blue color to something more fitting though.
In general it looks like your colors for text are taken from MS Paint's default colors. That's a bad thing.
Overall: Heading in the right direction but still a long way to go. Keep learning!
>>272600
I'll take your advice and post a result picture on my next go around with it for things text and button related, but I think I need to keep the colors and maybe even spacing on the friends list the same because it's following the way the actual Steam friends list in the Steam client looks for consistency
>>272890
The greens and yellows in >>271678
are way too saturated and bright.
I get that you're trying to "emulate" the steam friends interface, but just take 2 seconds to actually look at it.
The colors in the steam overlay's pallet are more muted.
With the right colors it'll make things look more cohesive with Steam's interface (if you're going for that on the friends list).
Right now, yours grab the attention way too much and the colors are pretty distracting. Make the borders on the profile pictures thinner, and change the font to something less bold.
At least what's there now is better than what you've started with.
>>271393
Thank you forgoten lore dev for giving these out on steam, i open it from time to time to vs bots. Great fun
so if you have artists, why not just give one of them the task of cleaning up the main menu?
It looks like a game from 1998. Check out Hearthstone for example to see how good design looks like.
>>272989
>every game must be hearthstone for it to be good
No. Blizzard is literally doing TCG the wrong way. They're going the same direction as MTG where there's obvious powercreep, and if you don't buy in to new expansions then you can't keep up and get dumpstered in matches.
Nice try tho.
>>272962
I will at some point, but $$$
>>273105
You've got to spend money to make money, and I wouldn't give you a dime for this garbage.
