Long Live The Queen (sim)

[papillon]

If you want an enormous list of PM-style endings and actual adventuring, play my Cute Knight series instead.

[HikkiPanda]

Lol I love how Hanako explicitly said this is going to be a cheap-and-short game and everyone ask about an endless amount of features

Hanako should just give up and submit to our demands >:D !!

[papillon]

Only if your demands come with large sums of money!

[papillon]

Here is an example of how your skills affect dialog (and the helpful display showing you that such is the case). If she'd studied her Manners, she would have been able to put this objection a lot more politely. As it is, the person she's talking to is probably going to take offense.

The little "skills" bubble fades in just above the textbox, drifts upwards, and fades out.

[PyTom]

The little "skills" bubble fades in just above the textbox, drifts upwards, and fades out.

I like that effect - it's a lot nicer than making the user go through an extra click per interaction. A lot of sim games would make users click to dismiss it, which just slows the game down.

How final is that text box? I assume not very, but I think it would be more readable with a little more xpadding.

[papillon]

The actual pink ribbons textbox, or the bubble? The dialog box isn't likely to go through too much more as I'm fairly happy with how it looks and I don't think I'm likely to come up with anything better. The bubbles are much more likely to get another design pass later. At the very least I probably want to get an actual arrow in there at some point instead of a text shortcut

[PyTom]

I meant the bubbles - the dialog box looks good already.

Consider going unicode for the arrow, if your font supports it. Deja Vu has all the symbols found here.

[papillon]

More graphics work in development:



This is the mood display, tracking Elodie's emotions. There are nine possible states (in normal circumstances) that she can be in; the eight named moods and 'neutral' if you manage to get all four of those bars to center on 0. In general, whichever bar is furthest from neutral, either up or down, dominates. In cases where there's a tie, as you see here, the bar furthest to the left takes precedence.

[papillon]

Because I've been busy working and this is the sort of game that is largely about skill progress and plot (and thus harder to give exciting screenshots of) I haven't said much here lately, but this is just to say that it IS still coming along, we're just about to bump into epilogue writing, and I expect it to be available next month. Hopefully. If the art is finished.

Also, you may remember that I mentioned Madoka back in the first post. There was a reason for that!

[jack_norton]

Really a cute princess... ahem queen

[Asterisk]

This is absolutely adorable I can't wait to play it when its done!

[Nellie]

Princess Maker. Madoka Magica Puella... BOUGHT!

I'm waiting/stalking for this game's release!! =D

I really like the interface as well. The text box seems a bit too cutesy compared to the rest of the interface (that I've seen so far) but then again, Elodie is way, WAY too cute <3

[HikkiPanda]

I really like the interface as well. The text box seems a bit too cutesy compared to the rest of the interface (that I've seen so far) but then again, Elodie is way, WAY too cute <3

it's the opposite for me, i love the text box the most o.o; .. but maybe the writing on the blue button should be smaller?

I think the stat screen is too plain. I really suggest to redesign it >.<

About the mood screen, I feel something strange with the ribbon and those triangles .. @_@; .. and I prefer a handwriting type font for the mood titles (Angry, Cheerful, etc). It's not a big deal though ...

Sorry if I complain a lot about the interface, I just want them to be in par with the beautiful character and backgrounds ^^

[papillon]

Yeah, I'm not so great at interface design, I know it. I try things until I get something that I can live with and then tend to stick to it.

(As suggested, the bubble spacing has been adjusted and it now has an arrow symbol, but for the most part it still looks like it did.)

I tried several times doing fancier things with the stats screen and every time the result was unreadably awful. Putting gradiented backgrounds behind the bars instead of just translucent black didn't work at all. There's too much data on top to be able to appreciate a gradient in that area, it was practically unnoticeable unless the colors became solid and then it looked ugly and hard to read. Still willing to listen to specific suggestions, but just 'redesign it' will be met with a shrug.

As for the triangles, the moods have discrete values rather than vague slider positions and it's important to be able to look at them at a glance and read the values (-1, +2, etc). The middle bar has to stand out sharply so that you can take this in at a glance (it was pink once and that made the whole mood screen too hard to visually process because all the colors were too similar).

The screen that's been through the most insane iterations is the class-choosing screen, because it has to have a bazillion buttons onscreen at once, which creates problems if buttons look interesting at all, and different problems if the buttons all look the same. The current version is: http://www.indiedb.com/games/long-live- ... reenshots2 and you really wouldn't want to see most of the versions that came before that...

[HikkiPanda]

sadly i don't have any idea about how to make the stat screen better ^^;

About the mood screen: I don't know if it makes any difference, but maybe try to change the triangle with circle?

I think the class choosing screen comes out nicely . Good work on putting all those buttons in one place XD!!