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!

UPDATE: I learned how the Overlay setting works. Before now I was just putting the logo in the background like a moron! I also did add the shine raid, not animated though.

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.

UPDATE 2: Here's a short video showcasing the menu in motion:

UPDATE 3: I have uploaded the menu! It now has custom menu sounds as well, taken straight from the game. The hover one might get annoying if you spam it too much. Debating on lowering its volume or replacing it.