Design — FlourishForever

Flourish Forever — visual and interaction design

A stage manager for a character's gestures

The player isn't authoring a new combat effect. They're deciding how their character reacts to moments already happening in game. That implies a configuration tool which stays out of combat most of the time.

Flourish Forever uses a Blizzard-style inset window rather than floating new action buttons over the battlefield. The approximately 620×520-pixel panel can be dragged and closed; its content is plainly divided between the spell that triggers a flourish and the actions the character might perform afterward.

The player opens it with /flourish, while /flourish config, ui, /flourishforever, and /rit are other entry points. Because the UI is built lazily, nothing has to stay onscreen during a fight.

Progressive choices inside the panel

At the top, one Enable ability emotes checkbox acts as the character's master switch. This doesn't erase the spell configurations and is initially enabled but silent when no abilities are added.

Immediately below, Add ability opens a dropdown populated from the character's spellbook, excluding known passive spells. The configured abilities occupy a scrollable list on the left. Choosing an item reveals its controls in the editor on the right; removing it removes both its saved settings and session cooldown entry.

The right editor answers three approachable questions:

How often? Chance from 0% to 100%, in 1% increments.
How soon again? Cooldown from 0 to 120 seconds, in whole seconds.
What can happen? A scrollable list of native WoW emote tokens with independent checkboxes. One enabled token gets picked at random.

No random emote plays when the player leaves the pool empty. A spell added for the first time starts at 100% chance, 6-second cooldown and ROAR checked; those are starter values, not an immutable character identity.

Visual vocabulary

The addon uses the existing game UI templates: BasicFrameTemplateWithInset, UICheckButtonTemplate, OptionsSliderTemplate, UIDropDownMenuTemplate, UIPanelButtonTemplate, native scroll frames and standard fonts. There are no runtime sprites, custom fonts, emote previews or animation assets. Promotional artwork lives separately in assets/portfolio/. The actual flourish comes from DoEmote and the client/race's built-in result.

This restraint makes the addon an expressive tool rather than an art asset mod. In-game character personality is created by selection and timing, not new textures.

Interaction details worth testing

The ability selector sorts spellbook results alphabetically, with ID ordering for equal names. Its stored key is a lowercase name, however, so rank variants may share settings; the UI could show multiple entries that edit one configuration. The scrollable emote list can be long and inherits the client's token availability.

There is currently no built-in preview button, no separate custom text authoring, no emote-scene editor and no UI control for keeping cooldowns through logout. These are potential future decisions, not overlooked documentation of existing functionality.

Possible accessibility/UX questions include slider readability at small scales, a visible warning that actual emotes may appear in normal chat, filtering unavailable tokens, and avoiding too many repeated noises in group content. None has been verified through an in-game test in this documentation audit.

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