Another week of UI work down!
This week I have been hard at work on the new flow of the single player game options screen.
A LOT of what this new UI/UX experience is focused on is making things very easy to understand and for controls to operate in an intuitive manner. There is of course an ascetic upgrade happening as well, but the primary focus is making it ‘feel’ good.
This mean the single and multiplayer game flows will be separated back out into two separate menus. The current UI was designed in a way to try and funnel players into multiplayer games by putting the server list as the default screen. In doing this, it made it very confusing for players to understand if they were joining a single player game or a multiplayer game and I was able to observe a lot of player anxious over this. Having separated menus allows a very clear distinction of what game mode you will be in.
Also, single player games can have a lot more options to customize and setup versus just joining a multiplayer match. The new single player menu has been focused on not only exposing all these options, but presenting them in a much clearer manner so new players can understand what the options are and how they will affect the game. Things as simple as color coding the AI player teams so they can be quickly identified in the options menu.
Also, I am doing a lot of low level UI code work to enable a lot of features for the UI that I had shied away from before. Things that are native to other UI systems, like drag and drop reordering of elements, needs to be completely custom coded and implemented in a generic way for MAV. This is a lot of code work, but I believe the usability benefit in the game will be massive. These are features we are all used to using and are learned behavior for interaction with a computer.
Because I want this system to be very good, I do not want to release it half finished. This is a massive update that will be touching all of the UI components in the game. Because of this, I will be delaying the monthly update so I can release this all as a single update. With my current schedule, this means the May update will be delayed and rolled into the June update. I do not foresee this delaying the June update!
Awesome news though!
The amount of content that is going to be in the next update will be staggering! Not only have we increased the help we are getting with art assets, we have also contracted our first official writer! You will start to see this content popping up in many different places 😉
That’s all for this week!
Comments 8
Is that a new map being teased without any mention!? That is beautiful.
Layout wise it almost resembles a very heavily modified version of the old No Man’s Pass with all the hills and valleys.
Author
🙂
I literally had a dream last night about the State of the Game and there was a new map released in it, and then I wake up to this! And it was pretty damn close to what I’m seeing in the image.
Too many trees, though.
I AM however, very very very very very glad that someone else is writing. I mean, you’re doing a fantastic job of programming and creating an amazing game out of basically nothing, but when it comes to story…
I just hope you’re not forcing them into the “A comet hit it and now it’s exactly like a small Earth!” story.
Wow the gorgeous graphics of that map in the SOG image!
So much done and rolled into a massive update next month. We are in for a treat!
Pretty much exactly what we were talking about recently. Give the maps a lot more flavor so the MAVs and objects don’t feel out of place.
Indeed, we want to be immersed into MAV even more 🙂
Author
Oh, you will LOVE what the writer is creating then 😉