Skip to: main content or site footer.

The future of StoryNexus themes

We've been introducing a lot of new features to StoryNexus over the past couple of months, and the interface has been slowly changing to fit it all in. It's taken a lot of time to make sure each theme can properly accommodate all these changes, which is partly the reason that it's been a while since we released any new ones.

Therefore, we've re-vamped the way themes are created to make them more flexible, meaning we can produce and adapt them faster. More themes for you creators!

We have introduced 'theme modules', small blocks of code that affect the look of a specific area of the UI. They affect fonts, drop-shadows, corners and even animations. Having the styles split up into chunks like this means developing themes is quicker, as we can produce the core elements of a theme very quickly. We can take the fonts from 'Sergio', combine it with the rounded corners of 'DarkStar' and the animations from the 'Default' theme, add some new textures and colours and have a new theme put together much quicker.

We've made a new theme!


In this way, we have put together 'Dusk', our latest theme. It takes elements from several previous themes and introduces some entirely new ones to create a theme which will be suitable for a whole host of different world genres. It includes:

  • Cold & dark colour palate
  • Crisp, simple sans-serif font-faces
  • Crisp lines and corners
  • Smooth animations


We will be rolling out this theme as soon as it is complete and look forward to seeing it applied to some of the worlds on StoryNexus!

Theme modules - how else could they be used?


It occurred to me that, since theme modules have opened up a new way of creating themes that look different from one another much more quickly than before, they could also be used to help creators make their games UI more distinct from one-another. We could potentially give you the ability to switch out fonts, animations, corner-shapes, shadows etc. on themes you have applied to your world. You could have 'Sergio', but choose to have the font from 'Monograph'. We would like to know if this is a feature that creators would find useful, so please let us know in the comments section below or in the forums.

Custom images


I know that a lot of you have been waiting a long time for us to introduce custom image uploads, and we are working hard to get it to you just as soon as we can. Once these are introduced, we will allow you to upload:

  • Icons
  • Location headers
  • Card backs
  • Logos
  • World icons (to replace the genre icon on the directory page)
  • Game background images


This will further help you to craft a distinct visual identity for your world - we're looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Custom CSS (what, Really?!)


We will also be introducing an area that will allow creators to upload custom CSS, so that they can potentially completely alter the theme of their world. Of course, you will need to know how to code CSS in order to take advantage of this, but we will also be writing documentation to help you make changes fairly simply

The future


So, as you can see, the nature of themes has changed quite a bit recently and will continue to change over the next few months. We hope that we are going to be able to provide you all with tools that will help make your worlds more distinctive and appealing than ever before.

Many thanks,

Liam