Menus - Alex
Main Menu
I’ve been playing a handful of JRPGs for research during the break, though admittedly not as many as I would have liked because something about opening and leaving a JRPG after three hours felt deeply dissatisfying to me, but I managed to crack open a few new ones and revisit a few others.
A professor of ours once told us that we could reproduce JRPG familiarity in our game with their usual trappings, namely UI and audio. While playing Xenoblade Chronicles and Trails of Cold Steel this break and navigating through so many different menus, I was reminded of the hours I poured into skill trees in games past. I started to wonder how we could take those menus and remix them to give our game that JRPG feeling.
I started with the player menu because they just always scream JRPG to me– from the party member portraits to the billions of buttons on the side.
The Buttons
When you break down these menus, there are some commonalities within the buttons themselves: inventory, equipment, abilities, party, story, and configuration settings.
Party Portraits
Parties consist of three to four members. Their portraits commonly display character faces, their levels, their HP, and their version of MP. Some denote the party leader and their roles within battle, and for others the information is more implicit (such as the order of members in a party).
Other Information
- Main Menu vs. Menu
- Text detailing what each button means
- Total playtime count
- In game currency
- Cursor vs. Highlight
- Icons for controls
Atelier Ryza 2 Menus
While I haven’t played this game myself and the menus feel almost too modern, something about Atelier Ryza 2’s menus really sell the “hanging out” aspect of our game. One of our external advisors, Oli, suggested we show the party members’ expressions as we play minigames to really make the player feel that “hanging out” feeling.
Now seeing these menus, I can’t help but think what if we explicitly show characters hanging out in the menus too? This, of course, would require more art and we would need to scale back on modernity to pay proper homage to the era of games we want to represent, but this could be another area in which we can keep pushing our theme.
Character Stats
Affinity Chart
