As predicted, there’s no update this month. I have not miraculously managed to get the entire UI overhaul done in just one month. I am by now finished with the new skin, though! Of course, changing the skin messed up the layout somewhat fierce, so getting it all into order again will probably take the better part of the next month.

Here’s a WIP screenshot of what it currently looks like, messed up layout and all, just so I’m not completely empty-handed (you can right-click and open in a new tab for a better look, apparently itch.io doesn’t do lightboxes):

That’s the result of an entire month of fooling around in Gimp… I had never realized before how many weird bugs it has! But it’s free, and it gets the job done, and doesn’t require you to sell your firstborn to Adobe, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. Another big part was familiarising myself with the libGdx skin composer (which is great - considering it doesn’t cost anything, it’s mindblowing!), coding together a couple new ui components to make it behave the way I wanted to, and fiddling with it all until things looked approximately right. By “right” I don’t mean “looked like I imagined”. I couldn’t imagine what they should look like! But I got the right feeling when looking at them, which is about all I have to judge how I’m doing. Feel free to critique, I wouldn’t be posting that screenshot if I didn’t want you to.

The problem with images and my brain

This was certainly the most arduous stage of the project by now. See, the problem is, I have a horrible lack of visual imagination. It’s not my imagination in general that’s the problem, it’s my ability to visualize things. Essentially, I can’t. I can’t imagine two colors side by side. I can’t imagine scenes I’ve never seen before. Basically, I can’t imagine images.

It’s not because of my eyes. My eyes are fine. I’m past fourty and don’t need glasses yet, and I don’t suffer from color vision deficiency or any other visual impairment. It’s my brain that is broken. Quite frankly, I can’t tell you for sure if I’m able to imagine color at all.

That may sound weird. Surely I can imagine some image and tell whether it is in color or grayscale? And the baffling answer is, no, I can’t really tell you. Images in the imagination have that weird ethereal quality where they are not exactly defined (at least that’s how it is for me). I have to focus on an aspect to resolve it, to make it recognizable. Before that, there’s basically an abstract placeholder there. I imagine that I imagine an image of something in that place, if you will. For example, I can imagine a face… but it’s not actually a face. It’s… something… in the imaginative image where I know there’s a face. But when I try to focus and imagine the face in particular, there’s… not actually a face there. It’s a blank, unless I insert some random face from memory. At least I can remember images… badly, admittedly, but it’s not impossible. And when it comes to colors in particular, really all I seem to be able to do is be aware what kind of color something is supposed to be on an abstract level, and then kind of insert that color once I focus on an aspect, but then all the other colors are gone. And if you hand me a color wheel and ask me to dial the color I imagined, I can’t. The image of the color is not sufficiently defined. Again, I suspect I more imagine to be imagining a color than I actually visualise the color. It’s hard to tell the difference, because I can imagine myself imagining pretty well, so my brain does believe there’s a color there. Or a face, or whatever. But every time I want to export that aspect out of my brain, it’s blank.

In short, I guess my brain doesn’t do images, or visuals in general. That’s… not a great thing if you want to make a video game. It leaves me with but one recourse: Stealing! As in, wholesale ripping off, and trusting in my inadequacy when trying to recreate what I stole to generate enough difference along the way for it to come out as halfways original.

Stealing a UI…

So I went and I picked a theme for my UI, which is an abstract decision that I don’t have so many issues with. I chose “cockpit” as the theme. The UI is supposed to look a bit like stuff you’d see in the cockpit of your spacecraft. Buttons, lights, gauges, switches, aso. I also knew that I wanted a bit of a dark, potentially claustrophobic atmosphere. In my imagination, the spacecraft you’re bumbling around with in the game isn’t a shiny roomy craft like you might see for example in the Expanse. I had more of a Mercury/Gemini style sardine can kind of thing in mind.

So, I needed a color palette to reflect that. And I went and I stole one. Luckily, I stumbled over something I liked a lot a while ago, that is sufficiently old and obscure to rip off relatively safely. Word is about this ridiculously amazing short film from the 60ies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQeRvTeX0tg

The cockpits seen shortly in that film were the main inspiration. My wife (a professional graphic designer that shares none of my visualisation problems) helped fill out and adjust the palette with additional colors I knew I needed. I trust her judgment that the colors fit together now. She’s rarely wrong about these things.

But of course I couldn’t just go and copy-paste my actual UI elements from that film. Too brazen, and also way too grainy. So I went looking for adequate image source material, because again, I can’t come up with this stuff from my imagination. I steered clear of screenshots of 3d-models and stuff, because while ripping and adapting individual bunches of pixels out of there and reworking them is not technically illegal, it just doesn’t seem right. I would’ve shelved out some bucks to one of those ubiquitous stock-photo sites if they’d have had something that would’ve seemed right, but nothing fit the bill.

In the end, my main image source turned out to be sites that sell salvaged airplane parts. This is great because it’s legally less concerning, because they’re not selling the images, they’re selling the parts. I’m aware they still hold copyrights to the images they make for their catalogue, but after I’m done with them they’re no longer recognizable anyways, and they’re not losing anything (not even a potential sale) by me doing it. Also, all the stuff there has a neat used feel to it, which is what I was looking for.

…and making it yours

Of course, those images can not be used without some major editing. The colors don’t fit, and they don’t conveniently fall apart into neatly scalable and animateable UI assets by themselves. That’s where most of my time was spent. At least at this stage it’s more about craft than about art. A craft I don’t know very well, true, but a craft can be learned. It’s mostly really just painstaking manual labor, cutting out things (by far the hardest part it turns out), taking them apart and putting them back together differently, turning them to grayscale, fiddling with brightness and contrast, overlaying the colors from my palette, applying some filters, cluelessly drawing over seams with the clone tool until they go away, all that stuff. You don’t actually need to be an artist to be able to do that, it’s all very much just following set procedures. I’ve done that before with satisfying results, just as long as I have an image to work with that gives me perspective and structure.

And so, I arrived at what you see above. Things aren’t all in their proper places yet, but they’re all there at least, and they have a look. And, despite pretty much all the difficult bits being stolen from somewhere, it still looks to be relatively unique. Something that I can still claim I made without my conscience going into overdrive. But it would definitely not tolerate calling myself an artist over that…