Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes

[ruckage]

Hi everyone, just thought I'd check in so you didn't think I'd gone AWOL. Sorry for the lack of updates, I've had a busy couple of weeks but will resume theme production soon :).

[felleg]

@ruckage s'all good man :)

[Stuart2773]

anyone else tried this attract mode version?

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773

Not tried it but it does look a very nice version and is very close to the real nes mini. Attract mode itself looks very impressive as it's much more advanced and you can customize pretty much everything. I wouldn't be surprised if attract mode became the default frontend in time.

[dankcushions]

finally got around to installing this on a build i'm sending to my brother - love it! as with most themes i find it looks best with the 'slide' transition.

great work :D

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

@Stuart2773

Not tried it but it does look a very nice version and is very close to the real nes mini. Attract mode itself looks very impressive as it's much more advanced and you can customize pretty much everything. I wouldn't be surprised if attract mode became the default frontend in time.

I installed the attract mode nes mini theme and it's very nice, but I'm a noob when it comes to attract mode as this is the first time I've really experimented with it and still trying to get familiar with it lol, but you should check it out. 😀

[ruckage]

I'm considering altering the layout of the theme slightly and would appreciate some feedback.

The reason for the proposed changes is that at the moment the boxart area only works properly if the gameboxes are all a standard size, for example all portrait boxes for NES, all landcape boxes for SNES etc. The trouble is that some systems have a variety of different shaped boxes and this leads to the artwork being stretched and if a user prefers screenshots to boxes these will also be stretched.

What I propose is to mimic the look of the real nes mini game tiles to a degree - moving some of the metadata below the boxart. The boxart will now be confined to a square area above this and will scale to fit this whilst keeping the aspect ratio.

The pros for this are:

• No more issues with stretched artwork and screenshots will also display perfectly if used.
• I will no longer need to define box art sizes per system which is one less thing for me to do while making the theme.

The cons are:

• The box art will be smaller
• In my opinion the metadata area is now not quite as interesting looking.

Here's a mock-up of how it will most likely look:

Let me know what you think, I like the theme as it is at the moment but do feel that with so many systems which don't have uniform box sizes that this may be be the best option. On the plus side I would only need to edit a few of the backgrounds and the rest of the changes are within the xml itself so it won't take very long to make the changes.

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage

I kind of like the new proposed look, I understand what you mean about the metadata box now looking bland, I think I have an idea to fix that issue, leave it with me and I will get back to you within the next day with a possible solution, in the meantime is there any chance you have a mockup screen of the famicom mini with a landscape box art?

Thanks

Stuart.

[SuperSirLink]

I like the idea of the rating and number of players under the box art/screenshot... That is actually something I am doing on a theme I am working on... I feel like it balances better instead of having just a game list in one column, metadata in another, and art by itself...

Hope that helps...

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773 said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

@ruckage

I kind of like the new proposed look, I understand what you mean about the metadata box now looking bland, I think I have an idea to fix that issue, leave it with me and I will get back to you within the next day with a possible solution, in the meantime is there any chance you have a mockup screen of the famicom mini with a landscape box art?

Thanks

Stuart.

I don't have a famicom mockup at the moment but a landscape box would look just the same only there would be white borders at the top and bottom instead of on the sides (the preview box is square). For games with more square boxart (gameboy, playstation) it would fill the area more and have less border.

I think the metadata area looks slightly bland now simply because the rating and player icons added a bit of colour and visual interest. I'm still thinking of ideas myself - ideally anything added needs to fit well and have a purpose, if you have any ideas let me know (it's a shame that genre can't be displayed using different icons as that would have looked nice).

[ruckage]

Had another idea so I just quickly threw together a few mockups, this time keeping rating/played/players on the right which looks nicer to me and have 'published by' and 'genre' either under the boxart or above the boxart. Going to work on it a bit more but what do you think?

[dankcushions]

looks good to me!

one thing i would prefer is left-aligned game description text. for large blocks of text i think it looks better than centred. but doesn't really matter :)

[SuperSirLink]

I would swap the developer and genre on the top one, but I like the top one best of the 3 mockups so far...

[Stuart2773]

i had a few ideas, but i think this one works best :-

changing the field backgrounds from black to grey or blue,
adding the official system info icons from the nes mini,

what do you think?

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773 said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

i had a few ideas, but i think this one works best :-

changing the field backgrounds from black to grey or blue,
adding the official system info icons from the nes mini,

what do you think?

Hi,

To be honest I like the black background for those boxes more as I tried grey before when I was creating the theme and felt that the black was more eye catching. Regarding the icons they don't really fit and aren't representative of any info in that area - plus some games have multiple genres so they would overun the icons.

Edit: actually I don't mind the coloured background for those boxes though it would probably need to be changed dependent on the system - I'll think about it some more.

[sergioad]

Hello, the ports virtualboy and MSX are allready supported?

[Stuart2773]

@ruckage

Why not just keep things as they were regarding the metadata box
resize & reposition the artwork box as shown,
replace the "hearts"as they are not representative of the nes/famicom mini

if you wanted to keep both left and right boxes aligned just have a smaller area for game description:-

[ruckage]

@Stuart2773

Not really bothered about remaining too faithful to the real nes mini, it's impossible to match it exactly so it was only used as inspiration. I simply wanted to make a theme with the same feeling though not necessarily a carbon copy. I think the hearts look nicer and are more fun and were used specifically as a homage to Legend of Zelda (if the real nes mini had shown ratings on the games I wouldn't be surprised if they also chose hearts to represent it).

I specifically don't want to shrink the boxes down as it will result in less space for the description and will leave too much empty space (had already tried that).

[ruckage]

@dankcushions said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

looks good to me!

one thing i would prefer is left-aligned game description text. for large blocks of text i think it looks better than centred. but doesn't really matter :)

Sorry, missed this post earlier. Thanks for the feedback, regarding text alignment I think I was having some display issues when I set it to left aligned but I can't remember exactly what, I'll try it again and see.

@SuperSirLink said in Cardboard Mini NES + Nes mini and Famicom mini themes:

I would swap the developer and genre on the top one, but I like the top one best of the 3 mockups so far...

Sorry for not replying sooner, I missed your post as well. I agree developer and genre would be better the other way around. Would you mind clarifying which mockup you prefer as it's not clear from your post (do you mean the one with the metadata above the box art?).

[ruckage]

I've tweaked the layout a bit more.

• The metadata and boxart frames a slightly larger.
• Published by and developed by are placed above the boxart.
• There is now a grey background to the boxart area which mirrors the description area background.

I think it's looking better than the previous mock-ups now.