Behind the Scenes — User Interface & Unlockable Features

Hi y'all😁 this month’s Behind the Scenes post is all about how I’ve been developing the User interface for New Hire and some future plans I have for when the game gets closer to launch.

Prototype UI Designs

Before coding the game, I built some mockups in Figma to get some first ideas for the game’s look and feel. Here’s an original menu design I created — since hard-coding the menu for the demo, I actually prefer how the real menu works now compared to this prototype.

I wanted to make a custom text box that takes up less screen space than typical visual novels, plus I wanted it to be low enough opacity so that the player could still read text on screen but could also see the art underneath…I did that pretty much entirely because I wanted Cade and future characters’ diapers to be visible/not blocked by the UI lol. I want my players to see and enjoy them diapers 🙏🏻

One idea I had during the prototyping phase was to replace the text navigation during gameplay with a reduced set of icons. This would take some of the business away from the text box and overall game screen, plus it could nest some controls into the settings page.

This is another idea that came from the icon navigation, a settings page modal rather than the whole-screen settings page that’s currently in the game now. Ultimately, this approach isn’t really worth the effort of completely reconfiguring how the game GUI works. It could be a nice-to-have, but would still result in a full-screen settings page if a player wants to scroll through save files for example.

Planned Unlockable Content

When New Hire launches, I’d like to include all chapters of Cade’s Corner in the game as unlockable content the further you progress in the story. This could mean either the entire collection of Cade’s Corner chapters available after first play-through, or individual chapters unlocked at important progress points in the game.

Either way, this would live on the main screen with the option to navigate by chapter. This’ll be QUITE the task to figure out, building a new screen here to host this stuff, but it’d be so satisfying when its done having this in the game to unlock.

Same as above, I plan on including a scene gallery which lets you auto-load the explicit game scenes as you unlock them. I’ve seen other visual novels do this and its just really nice to be able to skip to some of the 🌶spicier🌶 moments in the story.