Stage-Themed UI Colours

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve posted an idea I had like this to the forums, so I hope you like it! It’s a smaller idea, but I think it could be a nice little thing to put into Thrive.


In my opinion, I think Thrive’s UI looks great! It’s minimalist style makes it easy to understand and not feel cluttered, and it fits the environment of the microbial world very well. In later stages, however, it can feel a little jarring compared to the visuals of the game - especially in much different environments, such as land. I think it would be a nice idea to change the UI in later stages to better fit the changing look of the game and give a sense of progression - but making a large-scale change would slightly ruin the slow, gradual process of change between stages, and would make every stage feel more like disconnected games rather than one cohesive whole - even if just a little.

So how could the UI be changed in a way that felt natural with the changing environments of the game, without feeling like a complete overhaul? I came up with a little simple idea which I think could be nice for the game - Stage Themed UI Colors! I think that keeping the UI layout the same while changing it’s colour-scheme for each stage could be a nice change. I made some basic mock-ups of what this might look like below!



Multicellular - A lighter shade of blue


Aware - A plant-themed shade of green


Awakening - A wooden shade of brown


Society - A shade of yellow, like a brighter version of the Awakening UI


Even if this is just a small change, I think it could be a nice little thing to put in Thrive to hopefully improve the game’s feel, even if it’s just a little. Thank you for reading my post!

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While I like the idea of giving the UI slightly different touches for each stage, this is going to be a lot of work to do. And also as none of the other later game (as they are prototypes) UIs are completely it can’t really be done now without causing a lot of extra work in the future. Especially the icon button graphics need quite careful touch to ensure that the different variants are still readable (this is also a pretty big bottleneck as a bunch of the buttons with icons in the game are actually full images of the buttons so modifying them is not just as easy as swapping the background colour).

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