Hello, friend!
How've you been?! I hope your spring has gone well. Did you know summer's right around the corner already?! Time sure does fly when you're spending all of it working on Soul Saga! I've been focusing on Soul Saga's new user interface lately, and I'd love to show you some of that today!
Beta v9.3 Live!
Beta v9.3 is live and has almost all of the new user interface implemented! This includes the Title Menu, main menu and all sub menus, and part of the shop menus. Next I will work on finishing the shop menus and the crafting menus. The user interface implementation should be 99% done by next week. I'm also planning on adding controller support in pretty soon!
User Interface Enhancements
The biggest change over the past month has been a complete overhaul of the Soul Saga user interface design. The previous betas were simply using placeholder UI. I like to tell people that making a good game with a tight budget should be treated like baking a cake. You don't put on the toppings until you've baked the cake first! And now that Soul Saga is being finalized it's time to start piling on that sugary eye candy frosting!
Title Menu
The title menu sports a black and white background of the beautiful Soul Saga character collage created by Akaneko. The UI designer then created some fancier save file frames, and I programmed in a cool animated glow effect behind them. I also implemented in a couple social networking buttons at the bottom so new fans can easily connect with me to chat about Soul Saga and keep up to date on future Disastercake games!
Main Menu
The main menu sports more coloring in the background, but a bit desaturated and blurred so it doesn't overwhelm the foreground. This is the menu you'll be seeing often in game to access all your information. The goal was to give you some nice eye candy on the landing page of the main menu so you can enjoy your time here.
Other Menus
Many of the menus in Soul Saga will sport a notebook type look to it. The goal is to give the user interface some character by making it look like young Mithos has scribbled this information into his notebook.
New Title Theme
Soul Saga's lead composer, Ryan Camus, has created a new title theme for Soul Saga! This epic and inspiring theme is titled "Dream Big", and it captures the mood and moral message of Soul Saga perfectly.
https://youtu.be/OxP1gz3cFOc
What do you think?
One of the many things that makes Soul Saga unique is the obviously strong impact fans have on development. A recent question I brought up for fans to help decide is whether your airship should cost money to repair or not. Feel free to join us in the discussion on Twitter, on the Disastercake forums, or right here on Steam!
Thank You!
I'm going to jump right back into working on Soul Saga now! I'm so excited to share Soul Saga with you this year I can't even explain it! I'll always be eternally grateful for the opportunity you've given me to share Soul Saga with you, so thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU!
I'm still aiming to release Soul Saga on the PC, Mac, and Linux by late August, and I'll let you know if that has to be adjusted in the near future. So far everything is coming along well! I'll definitely keep you up to date about console porting soon after the Desktop version has been released.