State of the Game #236: Another screen finished!

I have finished the pregame lobby!

The new lobby is functionally better, is designed with the future in mind, and I feel looks pretty nice as well!

And now, the next big undertaking is the Garage. As I get to each screen, the design gets easier and easier, as there is a larger pool of assets to reference. The difficult part has been coming when I go to add functionality to a screen.

The good news is that with each screen, we are taking the time to improve the experience for the ‘right now’ while also planning the long term implications and features we want to add to each screen. The hope is, time spent now will save a much greater amount of time in the future when we inevitably want to expand the user experience on each of these screens.

For the Garage UI, Rachael has had some very good ideas on how to implement it, so she will be the primary driver on the design. I am sure that as we get into the UI, we will find a few improvements we can make to the experience as well. 🙂

Overall, it’s been a bit of a weird feeling these past few months. I have been so dedicated to ‘Get things done’ that I feel a big sense of emptiness not putting out builds constantly. Counter to that, is a very growing sense of pride. I very much used to pride myself on the delivery of builds and the speed of which I did so (and I still do), but now I am getting a true sense of pride for the CONTENT of the build. The pure quality of it. Maybe it’s silly, but spending 4 hours on a freaking stupid button, just so you know it works on all screen sizes, all game states, and the hover effect always shows up, brings with it a sense of joy. Or, I may just be losing my marbles from working on UI so much!

The search to continue to expand the MAV/Bombdog studios team continues as well. We are looking to add a new member to the team, with a plan to got from part time to full time, and have already identified the next position we will be hiring for as well. We are working with a few partners to help us locate the appropriate talent [we have a fairly tight set of quality/availability/cost requirements] so that it will not eat up much of our development time. This will also help ensure we find someone relatively quickly and that will be reliable. The web design experience/trauma has taught me a LOT and we do not want a repeat of that.

That sums up the details for this week! The garage screen is the last major UI project for this update. I don’t want to give away too many details, but it’s also the largest undertaking for the UI as well. I purposely saved it for last so we could roll out experience from the other screens into this one, hopefully making it the fastest to complete as well 🙂

Hopefully.

 

See you next week!

 

[P.S. Keep your eyes on the blog for weekly story updates as well! MAV is a big world and we will be fleshing it out every week!]