April 30, 2009

Alternex UI Iteration

Alternex now looks like this:

The only immediately visible change is that the numbers under the cities have been replaced with a progress bar and separate city icons to indicate their size (town, city, metropolis).

The more important change was the drastic reduction in notification popups. Rather than giving a popup window every time population grew in an unsupported city, it happens only the first time and cities emanate an obvious red glow when they're in trouble.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the way the UI turned out here; there's a lot of floating point numbers floating around the screen. It works fine, but it's still ugly. But I realized that my time is not nearly as infinite as I had led myself to believe, and I'm now just focused on finishing the high-score functionality and the extra levels. One final result of all of this UI stress is that I'm seriously considering buying a UI design book in hopes of figuring it all out. I'd love to avoid this sort of situation in the future.

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