With the upcoming user interface overhaul, the base ocean color will become customizable! You can already try this out in this experimental branch. Coming to the main game soon!

Also, continue reading for a sneak peek at my work on the new menu UI!

UI Overhaul progress update

For a long time now I’ve been looking for a way to better connect the games menu screens to the in-game UI aesthetic and settle on a unified, immersive style for the whole game. Since the planned content overhaul is all about making the game modes more immersive, the sterile light blue UI just doesn’t cut it anymore.

In practice, this mostly looked like hours of me hopelessly flailing from one failed draft to another. But this weekend I’ve really put my mind to it and came up with some elements that look quite promising! Check out the level detail panel on this mockup:

It may feel pretty obvious in retrospect, as it borrows heavily from the existing in-game UI style, but for some reason, I really struggled to make it work! Here’s just a small sample of various other directions I’ve explored before this one clicked:

The current design is still very much a work in progress, but a sense of clear direction is finally emerging! Let me know if you like it!

Bye Bye, Bleak Blue!

One nice thing about the new UI is that it should automatically adapt to any primary background color, which means the color of the ocean can and will be totally customizable (or at least that’s the plan at the moment)!

As linked in the beginning of this post, you can already play with this in the experimental branch. Aside of the color picker in top left, you can also cycle through a bunch of predefined ocean color presets in the options sidebar. And yes, you can also freely customize the faction colours. If you come up with a custom color scheme that looks really nice, post a screenshot on discord and I may include it in the base game!

Coming up

Next weekend will be probably quite silent, as I’ll be away from my PC, but after that, the new UI should really start taking shape!