The following project is a functional game interface run by the Ren'Py engine for my visual novel, Stolen Destiny. Visual Novels are an emerging medium to tell stories through art and writing to create an interactive story. These originated in Japan but have gained a lot of popularity in recent years through westernization and new interest in this platform.
The design of a visual novel highly impacts the audience initial impression of the game. The design of the game represents the tone and establishes the theme for the story. For example, Stolen Destiny is a spy adventure story, so the GUI reflects a spy-like interface with high-tech symbols and textures with a mature but pretty tone.
The main menu welcomes the player to the game, giving them their first options. Players can hover over the text, which changes the color slightly which you can see from the START button being differentiated. I also drew and placed the main characters here so the players can get familiar with them.
To customize their experience, the player can select their preferences including volume, text speed, window or fullscreen gameplay, and other options.
These screens are coded with the Ren'Py engine using a series of imagemaps, hotspots, and a little bit of python code thrown in (Ren'Py is an authoring program using Python.)
As the name implies, Visual Novels rely heavily on dialogue and narration to tell the story. The textbox is vital to players to be to read clearly but also carry the theme of the story. The character that is speaking has their name displayed above their dialogue with their sprite on screen.
This screen is organized to act as both a load and save screen. If the player chooses to stop at some point during the game, they select a space to save their progress in. When a player returns to the game, they will select where to pick up from the load screen. Very user-friendly.