UI Development - Papers, Parchment and Textboxes

While a little mundane, the need for material to put in game text on is very valued, from the collectable letters telling you of lore, to tutorial messages for the new player, every game has some need of these.

This post covers an assortment of paper material i produced for the game;

To start we wanted some nice text backing for our introduction to the world, dictating the story of the world, with respect to the time the best thing i thought would be to create some nice parchment designs that we could put the text on. To start i experimented with some format designs.

I quite enjoyed the open letter style (middle) which had a seal at the top, as it gives a good indication of something important the player would read.

Giving the parchment a nice paintover treatment and making a seal for it i came up with what is now our level up screen. (the story got repurposed due to some design decisions) I was quite happy with how clear i made the paper look and identify with what it is, 

As some of our more Game-y aspects came to light, between me and James we decided that we wanted there to be a paper that looked like someone has made up the story at the last minute for a tabletop campaign.

initially this looked more like a folded bit of paper, but the usage of text on this became a problem, so i needed a more straight forward design.

Taking inspiration from lined paper (and its vast usefulness) i created a bit of lined paper, and then proceeded to put our story onto it, and the "doodled" on it like it was someones set up for a story. i think this design adds a lot to acting within the theme of our game, whilst also being very easy to read and not problematic for our player.

Lastly as a bit of necessity i created a simple text box with some autumn leaf patterns for general and repurposable use throughout the game if need be. this was to cover any menu's the designers needed to make which were not part of the general plan.

All this paper was interesting to design, its not everyday you get to paint something thats so present in everyday life.