Esoteric Update #308 - Nu-UI

Hey, how are you? Did you celebrate the day our lord and saviour, Mithras, was reborn from the cosmic chocolate egg of the primordial bnnuy? I personally consumed a whole ten egg over the last few days. Honestly, what happened a week ago still bothers me, but I've been managing it. So, let's talk updates.

Last week, I mostly worked on redesigning some things and laying the groundwork for the new UI. This continued into this week. I went over a few UI designs before settling on one I enjoy. Though it's not just about a new UI, it's also about finally fixing issues with how the UI was made to begin with.

So:

1) The UI is now entirely abstracted through a series of extensions, meaning that if any change needs to be made to any element, the changes will propagate throughout the game. For example, if I decide I don't like the squishy buttons, I can change the button-generating code, and the entire game will respect the change. The idea is to remove bespoke UI/HTML work in favour of abstract constructions. Something that started being a bit of a problem at some point.

2) The UI now has a new look, vaguely inspired by some elements of neumorphism, but with my own twists. I think it tonally fits the game much better than the previous UI, even if it's a bit strange not to see the old UI anymore.

3) The UI is now colourable. While I laid the groundwork for visual themes and custom colour schemes a long time ago, it was unfeasible to implement them with the old bespoke UI in any way that made sense. So now that we have a new UI, we also have a return of the colouring. Right now it can be set through a config file, but the whole system is built to allow defining custom colour schemes and swapping between them on the fly.

Here's the new UI in the old colour scheme:

Here's the new UI in an example alternate colour scheme (note that even the logo obeys the change):

Here's the new UI showcasing colour mapping (it's not supposed to be viewed this way):

Next, we're using this new UI to implement the character creator according to the changes discussed on Discord. I won't go over them here, at least not until I can show them off in-engine.