![]() ![]() We did pretty thorough mockups, but of course, until people actually try to use things it’s really hard to know what works and what doesn’t, especially with something as finicky as user interfaces. ![]() Most of this typing was pretty straightforward, and from the beginning I tried to integrate all the fades and animation and sound effects into the controls so it was at least somewhat “real” and I didn’t have to go back and change major things. In the end, given the level of control, customization, flexibility, and performance I wanted, it made sense for me to just type it in. I looked at doing it in HTML with many different technologies, I looked at doing it in Flash, 2 I looked at custom solutions-I looked at just about everything. When I first started planning to implement the new UI, I looked around at a lot of libraries and products but I ultimately decided to implement it completely from scratch in C++ directly into the SpyParty codebase. PAX is a good testing ground for whether something works at all, since you get a lot of slightly-random quick testing, but if you want to find out if a feature works well, especially for advanced play, people need to spend quality time with it and use it in anger. ![]() Once the build was in beta players’s hands, they found many more issues. PAX went off pretty well, finding us lots of bugs and awkward things about the new UI’s usability, and we were able to iterate a bit before finally releasing the first version of it into the wild at the end of October, 2016. Because we use console controllers at PAX, 1 I had to not only get all the UI implemented, but all the focus handling and controller navigation stuff had to work as well. I originally revealed the in-progress new UI back in June, 2016, in a stream on the SpyParty twitch channel (and I archived it on the YouTube channel and embedded the video below), but the first time anybody besides me could actually get their hands on it was at PAX 2016. ![]()
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