Everstone Daycare - Text Box Redesign Poll

TLDR: Vote on which text box you like the best!

Howdy $10 Patrons!

As discussed in 'Plans for March', one of the things I wanted to accomplish is going over and re-doing parts of the UI that I thought needed some touching up. The first part I wanted to tackle was the text box.

The main issue I wanted to fix with the textbox is how easily understandable the options buttons that were anchored to it (the small buttons on the top right side of the original design) were at first glance. One of the first things I noticed when someone played any of the demos for the first time was that they asked me how to set the game to fullscreen, and/or they mistakenly clicked the options menu looking for the volume controls. Wanting to make sure the UI was as intuitive as possible, the moment I saw that immediate confusion, I knew that it was something I wanted to change in the future.

My original design was intended to be more compact and less obtrusive, only being small icons that illustrated what their purpose was without having to spell it out. It ended up not being as effective as I wanted so I opted to change it to something that explicitly says what the button does instead. This naturally means that the buttons themselves would take up much more space, so I chose to place them on the side of the textbox instead of above it to try to make it seem less cluttered. There is also a text-only design I wanted to try out (see Choice C) that’s a lot cleaner, but that one I’m not as attached to as I’d like to avoid putting other things inside the black of the textbox as much as possible.

The next issue I wanted to fix was that the options menu button is fairly misleading, as the only real purpose of it was to access the save menu and activate text-skipping (which should ideally be more easily doable from the UI button instead). With the example above, It’s understandable why people would immediately assume that that was where the volume controls were and not in it’s own separate menu (Which is unfortunately a limitation of the program itself for now). From Choice B and onward, I changed the logo from a gear to a floppy disc to better reflect its purpose, however some people may prefer the gear icon, so I’ve left it in the previous choices for comparison.

The last and most minor issue I think is that I’ve received comments that the textbox is a little big. It takes up quite a bit of the screen’s real estate, as it should, with this being a primarily text-based game. Still, it being such makes my goal of making the UI a bit sleeker more difficult, so in conjunction with fixing the first issue, I’ve made the textbox narrower from either the top or the right depending on the design. The final design (Choice D) is narrower from both sides, basically being a combination of the previous designs, at the cost of losing the “text skipping” button that I will have to find a way to fit in again somewhere there in the future.

It’s looking a fair bit different from the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team inspired text box I initially went with, but I think this could be a good change for the sake of this game’s experience. Please vote on which design you like the most, or comment on if there are certain elements from one design that you’d like me to combine with other designs instead. Thank you again!

Original

Choice A

Choice B

Choice C

Choice D