a major issue I’ve been thinking about was how they keep trying to present the game as “diverse“ and yet an overwhelming majority of the characters are black (with a couple ambiguously brown people).
if you don’t want any white characters that’s fine but where are the asians and Latinos??? No native Americans??? :/
a major issue I’ve been thinking about was how they keep trying to present the game as “diverse“ and yet an overwhelming majority of the characters are black (with a couple ambiguously brown people).
if you don’t want any white characters that’s fine but where are the asians and Latinos??? No native Americans??? :/
Immediately noticed so many errors with this. First, the text is too small. Already went over the backgrounds in another post but it needs to be said how much this is not working as a whole. The white text bubbles/dark text ultimately distracts from anything we can see (not that you'd want to anyways) and it doesn't lend itself to the a bright pastel photoshop filther mix-match. The art style simply does not work with what they're going for. It's like putting acrylics on wet paper-mache. It's not pleasing to the eyes and it's honestly a pain to look at. The key to good type design is varying hierarchy and we have such a lack of this here. San-serif fonts for outside speak (descriptions/choices) is fine, but it's also used for characters too? Even the main site for this game has better hierarchy than the game itself (though I'm not surprised if it's a template site).
We know it's supposed to be nighttime in this scene, but the text box doesn't reflect that in the slightest. Even visual novels when the protag goes to bed or if it's a nighttime scene, the boxes will usually change to reflect that in some way (whether it's a bg or text overlay) but here it makes it jarring because in other scenes, the color of the text boxes have changed. And while not every visual novel is REQUIRED to do this, keep in mind these developers have donation goals for voice acting/adding a white character, but not for fine-tuning their UI.
None of the negative space is being used in a valuable way. It feels less like text and more of a huge white blob near the bottom of the screen. I understand what they were going for as a more dialogue heavy game, but it's not executed well. They either need to reduce the size of the text bubble or make the text a bit bigger. There is just too much empty space, even for one line of dialogue. Traditional visual novels avoid this by usually having the text overlayed on top of a low opacity banner and removing it when necessary.
Notice how the opaque text boxes either:
A. Confine to the space of the page
or
B. Are unnoticeable enough not to be distracting.
The last one I linked? It was made from a small group of newbie developers (at the time) and even THEY were able to have a UI that wasn't as distracting despite it's age.
Okay, I understand they're trying to be humorous here but try to sell your game. We barely know anything about how this game works other than the diverse cast and that it's a visual novel set with the player in their 20s. Is it just a full on story? Do we have any additional gameplay? Multiple endings? How many routes? Secret routes? Your role as the player? We don't need direct answers to all of these, but show, don't tell.
They could have had the dialog box reflect who was speaking by showing a mini portrait/their symbol + color, but no. They said "fuck it" and made the dialog box a stark white rectangle with two rounded off ends.
I’d parade around looking like the lovechild of Captain Caveman and Cousin Itt before I’d trust anything looking like those abominations with a sharp object.
If I was running a video game company, I would put in the effort to make sure that it won't be an laughingstock...and to make it attractive to make an profit out of it.
But considering how the woke crowd fails to understand economics...