thimolor

I just had to put some color, sorry Dan. Rating circles use the same blue from the glow as do the icons (completed, favorite, broken).

You shall have your improvements

I think I will settle with this one. The shadow above the boxes was a great idea Dan. Needed to add more space between the boxes to work better with horizontal boxes and 4:3 ratio. The view has quite a lot of subtle animations. Now I have to implement these tweaks for the other views also.

I personally don't like the sections that are now clearly visible (top right info, top left video/screenshot, bottom wheel). Trying to fade the gap between them a little. I now used the same background for both sections and widened the separator lines to full width, put the glow behind the box art, favorite symbol above the box art. This composition would scale batter to different aspect ratios and allow for better video aspect support also.

I kind of liked it also, but still decided to remove the roundness. It highlighted the selected game well and the motion was nice, but it did not seem to fit in the overall look of the theme.

Now playing with colors. Midnight made me change the gray to purple. Now it's more inline with the glow and light strip.

@Dan Patrick would not trust web developers to get the colors right in there (I have some experience in that...). It seems they have used many different red tints there. They may have changed the color for the mini, who knows. For my eyes, this one has more the original snes red: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SNES_logo.svg And looking at these packages, it should be more vibrant than it is on that website you linked:

@Dan Patrick Well PC Engine seems to be too orange, I think Super Nintendo red should be brighter: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SNES_logo.svg, same with the Super Acan, the colors should be brighter. And Sega 32X red also seems to be too dark/orange. https://www.amazon.co.uk/SEGA-MK-84001-32X-console/dp/B0007ZNH5I. These are my gut feelings mostly. It's really hard to get the exact original colors without any brandbooks and original source material. The theme name started as BareBones, because I wanted to make something really simple. Now it does not look that anymore. So your right, I should change the name. Thanks for the examples. Midnight could be a good starting point for the new name.

Wow, I like how you are pixel perfect I must say i will disappoint you with the logos provided with the theme. I used many logos from your zips, but some had different color. I'm not sure what are accured colors, but the ones you provided, some had darker colors that looked like CMYK variations. I'm trying your animation, and I think I got it working. Looking at it and deciding if it's a keeper.

How about this Dan?

You have some nice ideas for the platform view, I will try those in the next demo. Your right about the glow and bouncing animation. Need to fix those. I think that after these changes I could give you a beta version to test the theme. You have sharp eyes, so you could spot something that needs changing. Thanks for the code!

Decided to ditch the custom banners. Now using only logos. The logos will require a transparent canvas (empty space aound) to work.

You need banners for the store platforms (Steam, Ubisoft, ...)? Not a stupid question at all. I know the pain of having to make compilcated assets to a theme. This time I have tried to make sure, that the assets are easy to make, or not needed at all. Actually the theme only uses one custom asset (platform view banner for one view). I figured that not everyone is willing to make their own assets, so the other view uses clear logos and videos instead. The custom asset is made with photoshop and it uses filters. I'm trying to make a simplified version of that, so it should work well on free applications such as Gimp. The only things needed for a banner are some kind of background image and a logo.

Almost there: Credits to Viking for the platform videos + arcade device image.

Small demo of BareBones theme. Things to do: banners, device images and system view. I don't think I will be making any more different views for this one.

This can be found in the game wheel views and game filter view. When you select this, you then have to configure the date settings to display the date as you please.

Yes you can output the games release date from Community Theme Creator Tool.

Thanks Dan for the help. Here's my banners and fan art examples. I think they blend pretty well in to the theme, always could tweak them more, but I don't think it is woth it. Looks better in motion than in screenshot. And the best part is that these are easy to make.

You are right there with the platform image set with the Genesis close up, it has really bad images. I will need to make my own set using the Evan Amos images. Huge undertaking, but it seems there is no way avoiding it. Good idea adding the dirtyOld platform view to the theme. Nice to reuse something and not make everything from scratch. I might still make a new banner set for the new platform view that fits better to the layout.

Got rid of the video in platforms, can't use those in fullscreen (slows down bigbox and wrong dimensions) and when small, you can't really see the devices clearly. Now trying to find good platform images... can someone help me? @Dan Patrick now the line has double the height

Yes, please. Send me the logos. Only made few banners for experimenting. Really good points. I will reorganize the game details for the game and platform wheels. Using icons only in front of text fields, because of scaling (need to support 4:3, 5:4 and 16:10 aslo) and I can't put text after numbers that change. If the details field has text/numbers that change for every game, I can't add anything after that. There are some irritating things with bigbox themes that dictates how the theme elements should be laid out. The gabs between icons and text are also quite large due to tha scaling between 4:3 and 16:9. I have to put enough space so that the fields wont overlap each other. The video should already be inline with the separator lines on the right, I need to double check that. I will test with thicker line, if it looks better. Thanks for the feedback.

Had to make custom banners, because the clear logos did not work so great. Still doing testing with different banner versions. Made some tweaking to the other two views also.

Okay, I think I have found my middle ground and going to settle with these versions. Might need to adjust the background brightness more. I'm afraid the gray tones aren't visible on many monitors and televisions and the theme becomes all black.

Last ones for tonight. I went for a different layout for now @Dan Patrick. The video alignment is a real headache and the only way to align it to the text field above, I had to put the video in a box. Not ideal, but it solves alignment issues (especially for vertical games). The box art I decided to put on top, because it balances the composition. If we have both the video and box art side by side, the bottom element becomes too heavy in the layout and leaves the top part too light. Even now the video element seems to be too big. I will tweak this more tomorrow with fresh eyes.

Thank again Dan! And don't worry, I'm not feeling sad for the comments. The more I get feedback, the better the designs will be. I will follow your guidelines and fix those few gaps you pointed out. Hopefully I can get this view polished tonight. I'm not sure about the black background right now for the menu. I have to do some testing with few ideas.