Saturday 29 March 2014

Interface interference

I'm here to talk about the recent rework of the interface - specifically the two side wings that report all the information about the game.

More and more information was being generated and reported so naturally it had to be expanded to cope. I knew a time would come when the wings would have to be swapped out entirely with a more flexible system and that change has now been made. For context, here's a before and after:

Before

After

Most noticeable at first is that the new interface is black and dark. Then you might notice that style-wise, it looks like more of a step backwards; the brick effect is gone and there's no real attempt to decorate it in any way - it's purely utilitarian. Then you might notice the fact that the new interface not only has collapsible panels but tabs. It's the tabs that were most vital to the change. It allows information to be spaced out and separated in ways that make a lot more sense.

So why did I go with all black? Let me show you something:

Diablo 2

Grim Dawn

Path of Exile


Here with have three screenshots from three great ARPGs and they're all currently showing details about items. There's a lot to look at so they chunk information by colour. I didn't notice until I was working on Asciilands but the backgrounds are always either darkened or made black before presenting text where colour is an important part of the communication. As soon as I did notice, howver, the reason became very obvious.

Here's something:


That's a quick little chart of how the same colours of text look on the old background and the new. As you can see, the reds and blues start to look much darker much sooner than the greens and yellows and this difference is very apparent on the lighter background. It's also just unpleasant on the eyes.
Sure, it's always nicer to read black text on a white background but this isn't like reading text. Colour matters and colour pops much better on a dark background.

The other point that I touched on but didn't elaborate on is the backward step in style.

Asciilands has a rudimentary text style so to keep it looking and feeling consistent with itself, I have to take care not to make things look too good. I think it looks better when it looks more thrown together within the limitations of DOS or something. Feels more like an old style game with newer style ideas. Slight future modification won't be out of the question...maybe even skins? I don't know.

Anyway, that's the new interface and the reasons behind it!