Devlog #4 - UI Design Update

Hello~

Time flies doesn’t it? It’s already the end of October! Before we start on the updates we’ve made since the last devlog, we would just like to mention that last August marked the one year release of the Norvale demo!

Time really does fly…

Anyway, on to the updates

GUI DESIGN

As mentioned in a previous devlog, we have decided to redesign the GUI design. So we have changed the visual aspect of the GUI, though the theme technically stays the same.

*for now, Music Volume & Mute All is disabled

In addition to this, we revamped the quick menu and MC name input! 

We had an idea to create a quick menu that appears on hover, and through trial and error, we got it to work. 

And with the MC name input, based on feedback, we added a “Confirm” button for better user experience and interaction.

DEMO FEEDBACK 

Based on feedback we got during the first release of the demo, we have adjusted and changed the font as well, and the text size of the dialogue in-game. We’ve also adjusted other functionality like adding a “Test Sound” option on the settings screen, adjusting the Auto Save (currently, we removed the Quick Save and Quick Load options), and as mentioned above, the MC name input. 

We’ve also fixed a few UI bugs like how the dialogue textbox would be bigger when the MC speaks. 

And for story script understanding, we added parenthesis to when MC has inner thoughts, instead of leaving it italicized and removing the confusion that it may be a narration or an actual dialogue.

DEMO V2 + MOVING FORWARD

With this, moving forward, we plan on asking a few of our friends to test the new GUI design. This will be using the same story as the previous demo gameplay (candy wrapper route), and depending on that we’ll discuss whether to upload it to our itch.io page or not for more feedback/participants. 

We still don’t have BGM, as we are focusing on the story, art sprites and GUI, but once we’re done we hope to spend more time fixing the sounds/music for Norvale.

In the demo feedback, we received feedback about the text size. Currently, we just made it so that the text is large enough to read and the font to be readable/understandable. However, we do plan on making the dialogue text adjustable and hopefully will be implemented by the full version or in future versions of the full version. There are also a few other issues we have yet to fix in this version, but we’ll tackle them one by one.

And that is all~ We’ve made a lot of progress this year and we are grateful to those who continue to support us

Links

Carrd: Alchemilla Studios Carrd

Twitter: @Alchemil_Studio

Instagram: @Alchemil_Studio

Itch.io: Alchemilla Studios Itch.io Page