It’s been a while since the last blog, probably because there’s a lot of stuff happening in the background! While I’ve been waiting for these moving pieces to land, I’ve been spending more time – again – on the user interface.

Since this game is designed to have playtimes of 10-40+ hours per session, the quality of the UI is important. It needs to feel comfortable, pleasant to use, and fast.

So I’ve fallen back to my design library roots and I’m putting together a simple UI kit. Despite being constrained by an incomplete CSS 3 specification and a few layout bugs, I’m pretty happy with the results so far:

Basic text styling and layout bits

I think tooltips are going to be important to be able to display context to the player without overwhelming them with text:

Rich tooltips can add depth

Along the way I’ve also been improving performance, fixing bugs, and adding features that normally, you wouldn’t give a second thought to:

The player should be able to write text wider than the input field