Sunrise Postmortem: Part III (GUI, CC0 Resource)

by S.

For the Sunrise GUI, I began by mocking up the GUI shapes and overall design in Adobe Illustrator. This allowed me to work out the composition for each screen and quickly test the color scheme and font choices. The color scheme changed drastically, in the end I only kept the orange for the hovered buttons.

Top, from left to right: main menu, save/load, say screen.
Bottom, from left to right: settings, credits and extras gallery.

 After I had the overall shapes down, I could print them out and use a lightbox to transfer the shapes to charcoal paper. The finished textures looked like this:

Top: Main Menu. Left: Screen Decoration.
Bottom Left: Textbox. Right: Texture Border

This is how the textures look when applied as masks to the main menu:

The Sunrise GUI is now available for download, with most assets released into the public domain. More information through the link:

Download

The GUI, Postmortem

Overall the GUI went by much more quickly than I expected it to. I went for a simple approach and tried to keep all of the main features in the default Ren'Py GUI. This is an improvement over past GUI design for me. In Asher, I hid the quick menu up at the top of the screen where it was almost invisible! However, Ren'Py's default GUI is actually very user-friendly, and that's something I want to preserve where possible.