A little over a year ago we introduced custom backgrounds and color themes, and we explained some of the effort and ideas behind them in a series of three blog posts: themes preview, the anatomy of a button, and colour schemes.
Both the addition of custom backgrounds and color schemes were good improvements. However, we are not satisfied yet with how they colour schemes work, or what options we can offer you to adjust the visuals of your campaign.
One of the problems we experienced on the development side is that it is a lot of work to create a new colour scheme. Both Mercury and myself have tried our hand at creating new colour schemes. both our approaches did not work out as well as we’d hoped.
On the campaign customization side we see a great need for a set of “dark” themes. While the current theme and its colour schemes work well with light backgrounds, it does not work out great for dark backgrounds, and does not allow for darker moods to be represented.
Now that we see the potential for improvement — and knowing how big of an impact the visual presentation can have on a campaign — we have decided to improve the way we develop colour schemes and themes as a whole.
Our main goal is to make sure that you can adjust your campaign’s theme to produce the right atmosphere for your campaign. This also means we have to make sure that all of the themes, colour schemes, and font choices and combinations we add will contribute to the overall atmosphere and feel of your campaign — and make sure we do not accidentaly turn some combinations into confetti death.
However, neither of us is a graphical artist or a designer. Which means that we need to do a lot of legwork: I have spent a lof of time last weeks reading up on colour theory, investigating how designers approach the problem of themes and colour schemes, and exploring different methods of translating those lessons to styling RPGpad.
If you have any ideas on how to approach colour schemes and themes, we would love to hear from you in the community forum! In the coming weeks I will keep working on the theme improvements, and we will keep you updated and the progress we make!
As always, we also have prepared this week’s changelog for you, where we go over the ongoing upgrade effort for the World of Darkness rules support.