Massive UI Upgrade

Argebe was released over a year ago at this point. Back then, I was really happy with how it looked, since my earlier frame of reference for what Argebe used to look like was the default Unity UI style. Anything that adds a bit of character over that default style is an upgrade.

But as time went on, I realized that it needed another overhaul. Now that time has come. I upgraded the Unity version from 2021 LTS to 6000, which also removes a potential security risk that they found a while ago, and got to work with some new packages.

I went through my old UI example and tried to nail down the things I wanted to change the most.

The old UI in question:

There's too much dark blue. That was like the most important thing I had to focus on. The foreground and the background felt too similar, the buttons weren't really popping out and there was too much contrast with the text.

I then did what I should have done a long time ago and made a whole bunch of prefabs for individual UI elements so I could make changes to the entire game from one place without needing to go through every single scene manually. Of course, for this UI rework, I did in fact have to go through all the scenes and viewmodels manually.

I eventually landed on an overall design idea for making new UI panels: A lighter external panel with darker internal panels. The dark blue colors are now reserved for buttons and other interactable elements, so they actually stick out from the background.

The new and improved UI:

Steam post imageSteam post image

Smaller text, less contrast, more detail without being too intrusive. Now THAT is a UI I can be proud of!

I also fixed some bugs, updated packages, added some smaller features and now I'm preparing for some more visual upgrades of the main game and some gameplay changes. Eventually I want to add a new gameplay modifier you can pick for your matches: Fog of war. But more on that in a later update!

Oh, one more thing:

As I said, I had to go through the entire game to change all of the UI elements. I tried my best to set everything back up the way it was, but there's a good chance some buttons might not work or windows might scale weirdly or something. If you spot anything wrong with the game, please use the feedback / bug report forms that you can access from the main menu to tell me.

Even though there's maybe like 30 people total who know about the game, and maybe 10 who actually play it, I'm still taking this whole thing as serious as I can, because I really want Argebe to be a game I can be proud of. Thank you for being part of the small group of people who got this message.