New UI Visuals

I've been working with an artist to update the entire UI of my game. After giving him some references, the first version he came up with was pretty spot on.

The suggestion I made was that I wanted to stick with the darker color pallet I had been using. I think it suits the game's tone more than going for a lighter color.

I was pleased with the final result. It captures the style I wanted to go for while still using red as a selection color throughout. 

Screens Simplified

I decided to simplify some screens. One of them was the options screen.

It had been too complex for far too long when in reality I only have a few options. I guess I wanted to make it more like a "proper" game, but I'm trying to simplify and reduce the excess as much as I can now.

The tutorials also got reworked slightly. I'm happy I went with this style. It ended up being quite versatile for what I wanted and it fit nicely with the new visuals.

All Honors Working

As I mentioned before, Yurei has an internal achievement system which I call Honors.

This month I went through all of them because I was sure some were either broken or just not implemented. And I was right. For the most part, the ones that were implemented were working correctly. But, there were a few late ones that were not implemented at all. I had one about defeating the final boss with all the Lucky Gods equipped, which was not implemented.

So, it was nice to get that sorted. The huge advantage of having a local achievement system is that it helps with testing. If it's working locally, then all you have to do with Steam is sync it up. Meaning, that whenever I unlock an honor I also trigger the steam achievement. So if the honors are all working the achievements should work as well. Notice I said it should because it's also important to test on the final environment. You never know! 

Fully Translated to Portuguese

I was holding off translating it to Portuguese until I had revised it multiple times in English. Also, with some of the new screen visuals coming in I ended up removing some screens entirely.

I have had the localization system for quite some time. So in terms of it working, I was 100% confident in it. Since all the UI was already hooked up to get the localized string value everywhere the real work here was sitting down and translating.

Translating the strings was quite straightforward. I had to look up other games for reference because I tend to play games in English. 

The more interesting part was translating the dialogues. It got to a point where I almost felt like in Portuguese, I should have more or fewer lines depending on the dialogue. But, since my system doesn't quite support that I decided to stick with what worked. Maybe for a future project, I will treat dialogues with a bit more flexibility.

Closing

For small wins, I also removed some screens that I felt were no longer adding value. I had a Player Status screen that displayed your stats and progress. I debated in my head for a while, but ultimately it felt like overkill for this game.

For the next month, I want to keep adding new visuals. There are still quite a few UI icons to be made in the new visual style. I'm not sure I will get all of them done by the end of the month but I'm getting pretty close.

I also plan on working on the Japanese translation. The game ended up with a lot of text so I'm trying to evaluate if it's worth the cost.

Once again, if you like Yurei or know someone who may like it, wishlist it on Steam. It helps a lot with the project.

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Thanks for reading all the way. Keep an eye out on Twitter @brightflask.