Tiny Furry UI Upgrades

Hey everyone!

Here's a weird little post that I felt like writing for some reason - probably because I've spent a few hours in the back end today making stuff look nicer on A Tiny Furry. Anyway, I've upgraded the UI. I guess I could call this a dev blog or something ... so ... let's call it a dev blog.

It's neat to look back on Tiny Furry's display because it's very much a visible evolution of my skills in Quest, sort of. I say it all the time - and I used to say it even more often - but making stuff look nice in Quest is hard. This is why for the first few versions of the game I didn't bother at all, and we just kinda stuck with the default settings for the display, as seen here:

I wouldn't say it looks horrible or anything but it's very plain. Plus, pretty much every vore game made in Quest in the past five years looks like this. So after a couple of months of Patreon, when I was actually getting some funding to mess around with the game more, I decided to change it to something a little more distinct.

Which was this. I think this probably looks worse than the original, honestly? But it looks distinct, and that's something. This was v0.5. For v0.6 I changed it up a bit.

Which in my opinion is beginning to approach something palatable. You can see that I learned that it's best not to make the text plain white and the background plain black because visually that's almost as obnoxious as black on white. This was v0.6 and things kinda stayed like this for a good while - with a couple of minute changes here and there. I didn't know how to make it look better until I started developing A Tinier Furry. Which is why v1.0+ look like this:

Which is ... kinda nice! I'm not sure what I was thinking with the violet hyperlinks, though. But, hey! It looks pretty, and it definitely looks distinct. In the grand scheme of Quest games, when you boot Tiny Furry up, you know that you're going into Tiny Furry just because of the blue background and font color and weird purple hyperlinks.

It was a good few months since I had done this UI change though and over the past few months (again, thanks to Tinier Furry) I have learned how to push Quest to it's upper limits when it comes to this stuff. So ...

Here's the new UI design for v1.2. It's not final - there's still a couple of tweaks that need to be made when it comes to spacing and possibly colors - but, hey. Doesn't it look nice? I think it looks nice. I think when you boot it up you'll at least get the idea that you're launching a somewhat professional and distinct product ... which is kinda cool! For me, at least. I always wanted to be able to call myself distinct and somewhat professional ...

Anyway. Yeah, considering that I knew jack shit about graphical design or CSS (the stuff that makes Quest's UI tick and the reason nobody moves past the defaults, really) at the beginning of the year and now ... well, I know enough to do this ... is pretty cool! 

As much as I've been working on my writing style this year, my stories, and everything verbal, I've also been doing my damn best to try and make my games more visually appealing too. Considering that my games are mostly just words on a screen I think it's pretty important to make sure the eyes aren't bleeding while reading and all that.

It's one of the big updates that'll be coming to the game this month because it's a pretty big update. I know that the above doesn't look like an enormous change but spacing out the individual elements so that they don't collide or overlap or look weird is a process that takes, honestly, several hours of tweaking and modifying ancient CSS tables that don't work on a modern level. I can't really explain it without going into a dumb Quest rant but I've implied it multiple times here and now I'll just outright say it - there's a reason that almost every Quest game is default black text on a default white background. Fucking with the settings that you can see often leads to disaster and fucking with the settings you cannot see can turn your game into alphabetti spaghetti in two seconds flat.

Anyway ... yeah, the UI has changed. I hope it's not super ugly or anything! I like it and it doesn't hurt my eyes and right now that's the only metric I have to go off.

In terms of writing, I'm currently working on that ending where you're in MIke's sheath, so I should have that up tonight. Probably in the early hours because it's a slightly chunkier ending than the others given that there's a crossover with Miles occurring and, hey, that's worth an extra few hundred words, right?

I attached a screenshot of the new UI so that it could be seen at proper resolution so that everyone doesn't think that I reduced the font size or something (I actually upped it)

Anyway, that was a dev blog! Development! UI! Other things. See you in a few hours!