It’s been a long time since I posted here! I’ve still been making solid progress on the game, and there have been a lot of changes that I hope I can cover in the future. One of the problems I’ve started running into is that there are too many types of building blocks and they don’t always fit in the current user interface. Some of my testers with lower resolution screens have complained they can’t see all the buttons. Here’s what the current building UI looks like:
Other than getting too wide at the bottom, I don’t like the way the buttons look. The bevel on them doesn’t look very modern and the square corners don’t fit with the rest of the UI. Everywhere else I use flat buttons with rounded corners.
Here’s what the new building UI looks like:
I moved the categories to a bar along the bottom of the screen which frees up space for the buttons on top. There can also be more categories now when one category becomes too big. The new buttons look a lot more consistent with the rest of the UI. I also made some minor changes like aligning the edges of the tool tip to the edges of the buttons.
I drew a quick mock-up before I made the change:
You can see that this concept includes some features that haven’t made it into the UI yet. One thing I was thinking of was having extra-large buttons for ‘templates’ which combine a bunch of building blocks together. Some of these exist today but they don’t look any different than individual blocks in the UI. As I add more of these I might make the change to differentiate them more. The topic of ‘templates’ probably deserves its own post.
There’s also room for a mini-map. I’m still on the fence about whether or not to include a mini-map. The other possibility would be to have units get replaced by icons as you zoom out far enough, so effectively the main view becomes a mini-map.
Above is another quick mock up I did of how the UI would look when you select a unit. I’m planning to use the bottom bar to include stats about the unit, which aren’t accessible currently. You can also see how it might look if zooming out were to replace units with icons.