Problem Solving: Text Boxes (Patreon)

Before arriving at the anime subtitle look in Benefitship, we made several attempts at coming up with a nice textbox for the game. We took inspiration from several other visual novels, such as Doki Doki Literature Club and Katawa Shoujo.

Ultimately, though, we felt that our attempts interfered with the overall vibe of the game (not to mention, it covered up Chloe's and Amy's genitals, which is a big no-no).

We eventually tried a basic gradient, both a black one and a blue/purple gradient one (not shown here).

Then I looked at it and went "You know, the gradient doesn't even really do anything because we need the text outline to create contrast anyway. Why not just get rid of the box entirely?"

And so I did!

The final look was based on Crunchyroll's subtitle look. Overall, I think it created nicely contrasting, readable text, and a style that integrates it well into the world.