Dev Diary: Mystery Chronicle Menu Theme

Roughly a week ago, I finally started messing with making custom menu themes. I chose to make a theme based on Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics. As one of the few people to care about this game (and because I have the music and voice lines directly from the game files available), I have a personal connection to it. 

The first thing I did was draw a recreation of that game's logo to get a general concept of the idea down.

Before starting over from scratch, I doodled a new image of Shae and did a few in-game menu tests.

Eventually I redid the entire logo in Krita. With the power of vector layers at my disposal now, I could have better control over recreating the squares and text. I didn't find the exact same fonts that are in the Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics logo, but I think the ones I found are close enough. One other thing I struggled in recreating the gradient of the main text (other than the gradient itself, there is also a grid-like pattern which is not really that viewable unless you look up close).

Shae's art was not drawn by me; I simply lifted her art from the game, added legs to it, and then added the filters. The image from the prior mockup was just a sketch I never polished up and just hastily colored in for the in-game test. The background comes from Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics' original Japanese website (and is NOT Guar Plain). I thought of recreating the background from one of the game's menus but that would require a lot more time/effort so I went with this approach instead. 

For the main menu theme, I chose "My Journey Preparation", which you can listen to below:

The game's title screen theme is very repetitive and gets annoying after a while, so I chose this theme instead. If there was left and right gradients I could stick the Shrine Raid in!

I plan to release this theme after I finish developing the host, judges and voice clips some more. I am open to releasing the theme sooner if people are interested.