Rogue Tower is a tower defense indie game which mixes procedural map building, deck building and rogue-lite type of games in one of the most addictive tower defense games I've played in a long time. It has however one mayor flaw in my opinion, and it is the way it displays the information in its GUI. This is the reason why I chose it as a personal project to redesign and update.
I wanted to keep the original feeling of the game so I didn't do a complete overhaul of the elements making up the GUI of the game. That being said, there are a lot of elements that I had to make from scratch as I had no way of retrieving it from the game itself. This resulted in me having to change typographies and replacing the moving background; that and my decision to remake the logo, background color and buttons resulted in a fairly different start screen.
As for the logo; I planned to take the same idea and remake it with the new typography, colors and philosophy, but opted to change the concept of the rotated R and flipped it instead to give it a less dynamic but more centered look, resembling the skyline of a tower surrounded by castle walls.
The main gameplay screen you'll see in the game is this one. It looks pretty simple and straightforward s it is but as you progress through the game you start noticing one main issues.
The issue is that as you start getting tower upgrades piling up on each other, new information starts appearing on screen and you can only guess what it means because it's not explained at all and it doesn't display on an organized manner. Most users take 4 to 7 playthroughs to start making out what everything means.
For that I changed the way all the information is displayed on screen without deviating from the original graphic concept of the game. with information that can be constantly displayed onscreen without crowding the middle of the screen as before.
The information displayed can be partially hidden so it doesn't take too much screen space and it's much more intuitive as it is guided by new iconography and grouping by size, color and image weight.
I updated up to 31 different icons and divided every possible upgrade card onto 5 different categories, Made a graphical UI overhaul and classified them by color.
Hope you enjoyed the project. Stay tuned as I'll be adding more sections of the game as I make them and don't forget to check out the original game on steam.
Rogue tower.
