Lemma Soft Forums

The launcher rewrite project has been kind of kicking my ass. I'm fairly good at software design - where I can explore tradeoffs and find the best solution - but I'm no good at artistic design. So let's see if the forum can help me out, so that I can get a new release of Ren'Py out sometime this decade.


Some thought's I've been having:


Originally, I was thinking of something inspired by Metro or another interface style. But lately, that idea is less and less appealing to me. For one thing, whatever design we pick will be out-of-place on every platform except for the one it's designed on. Also, what looks modern and cool today will look dated in a couple of years. Basically, I'd like us to do our own thing.


I've been kind of contemplating a dialogue-based design. (More than just contemplating - the RAPT tool has an early version of a dialogue-based interface, just to try it out.) To think about this, realize that there are three basic modes of operation of the launcher.

1) Open-ended choices. This is the mode where the user is being offered the opportunity to decide what he wants to do next. I figure there are several variations of this screen:

- The user is presented with the ability to select a project to work on, create a new project, or configure launcher settings.
- The user is asked if he wants to edit the game, launch the game, apply a tool to the game, or package the game.
- The user is asked what label he wants to start editing from.

etc.

2) Closed choices. This might be a prompt asking if you want the game to run in landscape or portrait mode.

3) Progress. This is when the launcher is telling you about what it's doing, as it's doing it. For example, packaging progress or status reports.


So what is a dialogue-based launcher? I'm thinking of a next-generation launcher where Eileen acts as an assistant/collaborator that works with you on creating your project. If this sounds a little inspired by Analogue, that's because it was.

Of course, there's a balancing act here. We don't want this to turn into Clippy, where you have to go through a ton of screens in order to get what you want to do done. But I'm thinking of having screens like this one:

Eileen wrote: Welcome back to Ren'Py 6.14.1. What would you like to do?

User wrote:
I'd like to work on...
... Moonlight Walks.
... Let's Hentai Hentai.
... Katawa Shoujo 2: Katawa Planet.

I'd like to create a new game.
I'd like to change launcher settings.

I'd like to exit the launcher.

While the actual dialogue would vary, the idea would be to to present up to two dialogue windows at once - one for Eileen to report what's going on, and one where the player can choose what he wants to do, or to answer her questions. Since both windows will be on the screen at once, there won't be any extra clicking compared to today's Ren'Py Launcher.


A big problem is that I've been unable to figure out a way to implement this that feels attractive to me. There are several graphical design issues that I'm
having trouble with:

- What should the background looks like? Should it be something simple and abstract, or something more artistic?
- Do we need frames behind the dialogue? If so, what should the look like. I think they should be relatively simple, so we don't waste space with complicated borders - but apart from that, I don't know what they should look like.

Basically, I have really abstract ideas, and I don't have the skills to express them graphically. Hopefully, some of the artists and designers here will be able to give me a little bit of help in making this - right now, I think this is at the brainstorming phase more than anything.

Thanks.

I would use something very simple/minimalist. Still speaking about Analogue, something like that game UI, simple in design but efficient

@PyTom
Frankly speaking, I don't know why you want to do that. The present launcher is good to use.

The problem with the present launcher is that:

1) It's ugly.
2) It won't scale. I'd like to add more functionality to the next-gen launcher, and there isn't really any more room in the current design.

I definitely prefer simple. Personally, I don't think artistic is cool. What I think cool is: "quickness", "anti-alias", "transparency", "gradation" and "transition" optionally.

Artistic is definitely to avoid - it would be distracting/confusing and out of place/useless. Personally I find nothing ugly about the current launcher, since we're talking about a development tool I understand the issues about scaling it though.

It's not ugly. I didn't even think about the launcher that point of view... Well, if you want to and it is needed, I would say that the simple is best.

Darn, I just had to jump into the fray...

So here's what I think it should look like. Utilitarian, but nicer-looking and with an organization that makes more sense.



(noticed that it's missing a "theme" button, but it could be next to options or something)

Hm... I think one thing to consider is that everyone here is experienced with and used to the old interface, and we're not hearing from new users, who've never tried Ren'Py before and might not understand the present interface that well. Personally, I'd still like the older format, but I can't help but think that that's just becase I'm used to it now, and don't need the explanation of a text based launcher...

I feel like a non-dialogue-based interface would not too hard for a newbie to understand, especially with some sort of annotated tutorial. If someone doesn't bother to read the manual, they won't get very far in making a game, anyway.

It may not be too hard to understand, but it will be harder. In terms of reading the manual, I'm not sure that most of the people here do read it. There are quite a few questions in the Ren'Py questions forum because of this. The manual is also not the simplest thing, and can be confusing for newer users. There's a lot of information, and the users might experience "information overload" or simply not understand what the manual is saying (the language might be too "technical" ).

It seems pointless to me to try to make the interface user-friendly to the extreme when the tool itself almost requires new users to use the tutorial - there is no GUI or anything that would help someone understand who hasn't studied the code. Might as well include in the tutorial tips about navigating the launcher instead of bending over backwards to make the launcher easy to understand (but potentially more difficult to use). Heck, it already has tool tips for each button - I was able to figure it out pretty quickly.

(Or maybe put a splash screen at the beginning that says "new user? read the tutorial!" with a link directly to it.)

The goal of the DBL isn't really to increase user friendliness - it might, it might not, but that isn't why I want to do it.

Rather, the goal is to replace the current launcher - which is really ugly - with one that looks a bit nicer, and has it's own style to it. Really, any style could do - so why not have one that's inspired by visual novels, if it doesn't hurt the efficiency of launcher use.

Honestly, I think the current launcher could use some typographical adjustments (a nicer sans serif for the links, and another shade of blue while at it) and it'll be good to go. Not once have I thought it ugly and even more importantly, it has never gotten in my way!

As a designer, there are some categories in the launcher that I felt would go better together, hence combining some of the buttons. Would that work, or were you looking for something different? I also feel that the main tools should be emphasized in a sort of "1, 2, 3"-step manner. It could have more of the "pretty" factor added on later. The current text-only launcher, though, is not very fitting - it really screams "placeholder!" to me. Tends to be the case that programmers don't really bother with that sort of thing, but it's still important.