Aesthetics

I spent a bit of time last night working on the new look for Bones of the Idle. I’ve been on a bit of a lo-fi vaporwave kick at the moment, and seeing how much of the game is supposed to evoke a kind of wistful nostalgia for late 80s/early 90s BBS door games like Legend of the Red Dragon (1989) and classic ASCII roguelikes (Rogue, 1980), as well as early pixel art gems from the 8-bit eras of the Spectrum and Commodore 64, vaporwave seemed like a good fit.

Some vaporwave discussion on YouTube

Prototyping

I prototyped some UI elements like simple buttons, basic form elements, overlays and popup boxes, and ended up implementing them on the main home screen, which I think looks pretty good now:

It’s aggressively neon, the green glows in a totally tacky way, and I’m mixing green and pink in a way that shouldn’t exist in nature. In short, I’m pretty pleased with it.

I’ll be sticking mainly with this colour palette (top row), which I think most would consider to be canonically vaporwave, but I’ll also be experimenting with the colours on the bottom row, which are the 180° hue-rotated compliments. In theory they should compliment each other well (if used sparingly), but I’m no designer or colour theorist. I’m pretty confident in my skills for the more technical aspects of getting this game built, but the look and feel of it is something I’m really going to have to work at and pay close attention to.

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