GUI Layout critique/advice?

[KarmaLarma]

So to start off with some context, I'm rather new to UI design. I've made a couple of very small VNs before (both in TyranoBuilder) and didn't bother with customizing that aspect since both games were just to practice what a visual novel actually is. I've been working on my first larger project for a little while now. And the other day I saw the Visual;Conference video on the important of UI Design (which you can find here if you wanna hear some interesting discussion on that sort of thing). The idea of bringing interesting elements directly into the main UI rather than hiding stat bars in a separate menu like I was planning to do caught my interest so I figured I should design the UI sooner rather than later to plan around it.

I knew I wanted my protagonist to have a side image since he doesn't have a full sprite.
I knew I wanted to implement the 'personality quirk' sliders into the main view so that when the player makes a decision that affects them, they can watch and see it happen.
And I knew I wanted the buttons to look a little quirky since I have trouble doing plain text buttons without making them look totally sterile and bland.

So I sketched up my ideas (using sketches I already had of some of the characters to get a better idea of how it worked together)


Then I designed my box and added it in


But I realized there was something I totally didn't account for. Whenever Harvey isn't there, the Quirks box makes it look totally imbalanced.


I find side portraits for visible characters to be very redundant so I don't want to add that. So I thought I'd ask on here.
Should I add a placeholder for Harvey's spot, scoot everything over and make Harvey overlap it more, or just try to find a way to make the Quirks stat screen collapsible?
In addition, any ideas on how to make a UI look more polished? I haven't gotten around to changing the text and name fonts and such yet other than shrinking them, but critique on anything else would be much appreciated.
Thanks for your opinions!

[parttimestorier]

Looks nice! I think making that "quirks" screen collapsible is a good idea. It doesn't seem like something that you'd need to be checking constantly, and that way the screen is more symmetrical when the characters without side portraits are talking. Maybe you could put a quirks button at the top of the textbox, next to the menu button, with a little arrow to indicate that it will slide out at the side or something. (But that's just the opinion a potential player - I don't really know much about design on a technical level.)

[KarmaLarma]

It took a lot of fiddling since I'm new to coding, but thank god for the Ren'py cookbook part of the forum hehe. I managed to make the quirks sliders collapsible and it looks a lot nicer.



Also got them to animate (this gif makes it look choppier than it is) so I'm pleased with that!