OK, first of all, the more I see your artworks, the more I like them.
When
I did the environment arts for the Planet Suitability Panel, I encountered the same problem as you: I did first big and detailed images, but they do not fit well in the FO UI.
Some thoughts:
- 500x500px is way to big, at least until we have a better layout engine for images in FO.
- Not a big deal, but I'm not a fan of the "brushed contour" with transparency. As everything is "square" in the FO UI, it does not look consistent with the rest.
- I think that most of the players read the pedia in-game (not from the title screen). So, in-game, the pedia window default size is smaller, we can't have too big images that require to scroll too much.
- IMO, the purpose of images is to have of course fancy visuals, but also to provide some "visual memory" to various stuff. There is a lot of species in FO, and for a new player, it can be hard to remember who is who, and what each looks like. Your atworks do perfectly the job: varied, colorful and cleverly stylized. It makes each species easily recognizable and easy to remember (each time I read "Banforo" now, I see mentally those sparkling-eyes cute and white teddybears now
).
So these artworks have to be inserted in a way that a new player can't miss them the first times he plays FO, but also in a way that they won't become annoying once he get used to it.
That's what I did with the planet environments: the first time a planet suitabilty for, let's stay, "Toxic" is displayed, a player can think (I hope): "Oh, nice, it's what a toxic planet looks like" but after several displays, the image won't get annoying (as the player is here for the textual data) and he can easily ignore it now.
So, I think, the species arts must have the same purpose.
Here's my proposal:
- Image size: 350x115 px (3:1 ratio). I think it's the best compromise, according the pedia window default size in-game. For the environment arts, I used a 5:1 ratio (350x70 px). But it would be a crime to reduce your nice work at this size. ^^
- Add a grey contour (the same as the FO UI panels).
- Insert the "preview" image right at the beginning of the article.
- Insert the full image at the end of the article.
- Put the "Homeworld" data right after the "Environment preferences" (currently, at the very end of the article, don't know why...)
Here's a screenshot (it's not a mockup, it's in-game):
- species_art_insert.png (424.11 KiB) Viewed 6304 times
I release every updated file under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.