Been rather delinquent on updating the Erika game, but I'm mostly bogged down in UI stuff (which is also supposed to be used in
Redaction's nebulous "final" release). I wanted to run some stuff by folks and get a general sense of what looks best.
At first I was just messing around with different options for displaying direction in the menus. The bottom option represents the way it presently is, an allcaps cardinal direction for any action that involves movement. I considered abbreviating it (as NORTHWEST uses a lot of button real estate), coloring it for clarity, and so forth, but none of them looked quite right. I also added the red (!) as a sort of indicator of any action that will take time, as I've decided I'd rather not
explicitly tell the player how long a time-consuming action may take.
Shortly thereafter I tried using unicode arrows to represent the directions, but I was wary of this because it's sometimes hard to mentally correspond one to the other. I like the idea of organizing the "takes time" and "movement" icons together at the start (or possibly end?) of a line, but the colors still aren't right.
So then I remembered Ren'py can do inline images in text, and...
I like the icons. They're clean, they explain their function (especially fond of the clock), and they draw the eye in case you're just looking for your options while not taking up a lot of screen space.
I'm thinking of going with this last idea, but I wanted to see if anybody thought it was more intuitive some other way.