Game UI, driven by one resource

What it looks like in a game

The medieval and sci-fi presets — character sheets, inventories and quests; forms, grids and prompt cards; angular panels and touch controls. Switching presets is one line of code.

All six presets and how to switch them →

What it takes off your hands

What costs the most time in game UI is not the shape of a button — it is everything that drifts apart between devices. gohud handles that drift in one place.

Change the look — colours and shape

A Theme can only restyle what the engine draws. Rounded corners are the only corners StyleBoxFlat has, and the joystick, quick slots and coach mark are drawn by code — so a theme alone can never change their shape. gohud therefore ships presets: a theme, a skin and an icon set picked as one unit.

GoUi.use_preset(GoThemePresets.MEDIEVAL_DARK)   # theme, skin and icons together

Those four are the same gallery screen. Not a line of code differs — only the preset name. Button corners, toggle shapes, list rows and input borders all move together.

Medieval collection

medieval_dark pairs iron and leather with antique gold; medieval_light uses parchment and ink. Menu frames carry a rivet and a small corner ornament while the always-visible HUD stays quiet; 16 engraved icons redraw the item names, and only titles and subtitles use the bundled Cinzel font.

Both shots are examples/medieval/medieval.tscn, built from the standard widgets. The medieval guide and how to make your own kingdom →

The same screen on a phone and on a desktop

The gallery shots are a phone in portrait. Below is the same code at 1280×800 — the content stops at a readable width (480dp) and centres, while the HUD stays in the corners. The form steps around floating HUD pieces, but does not move when it is already clear of them: pushing anyway would throw the content off-centre on a wide screen.

The same sheet, a different look

Pick one from Project Settings → gohud → Theme → Preset, or set GoConfig.preset. Filling in theme, skin or icons explicitly wins over the preset, so you can take a preset and override just one of them.

Skins — where a Theme cannot reach

A skin owns the joystick, quick-slot faces, the coach-mark ring, chips, skeletons, alerts, dividers and section headings. Subclass it and override only what you want changed.

class_name MySkin extends GoSkin

func slot_box(accent: Color, lit: bool) -> StyleBox:
    var box := GoStyleBoxCut.new()
    box.bg_color = accent
    box.cut = 6.0
    box.edge_color = accent
    return box

All three serialise into a Theme resource — which is what lets a theme change shape, not just colour. GoSkinSciFi and GoSkinMedieval are the shipped subclasses.

Widgets

The pieces, in one table. Each one in detail →

Waiting, telling, counting

Forms and lists

Shapes games actually use

Over the screen

Readability is measured, not eyeballed

"Pretty" is taste; "legible" can be measured. Faint grey text looks fine on a good monitor and disappears on a phone in daylight — picking by eye guarantees it eventually.

python3 addons/gohud/tools/check_contrast.py

Every colour pair and every button state's label over the panel it sits on is measured against WCAG, in all six themes. Translucent colours are composited over their real backdrop first — measuring them directly reports a better ratio than the screen shows.

Text colours are therefore derived, not chosen: the builder takes the palette entry as a starting point and pushes its lightness until it clears the threshold on every surface it can land on. Change the palette and the contrast follows. The rules and the traps behind them →