[DISCUSSION] UI Design & Thoughts

by **lord of 13** » 25 Nov 2010, 02:07

Hey Frwololo and other UI devs,

I'm creating my own rules-compliant engine & game for MtG in C#; I've so far finished the deck editor and a few minor things like format legality enforcement as of today. I'm beginning work on the front end gameplay GUI of my project, and am also seeking a few people to chat with about developing such a GUI. Generally speaking, I want to discuss how to expose the many aspects of the gameplay are expressed by the board state - permanents, counters, gained abilities, attached cards, zones, etc. Please PM me or reply on this thread if you're interested; I would like to publish an article on my blog by this Monday (28/11/10).

Thanks,
Lord of 13

by **frwololo** » 04 Dec 2010, 12:04

Sorry for the late reply, I don't come here that often.

Wagic is available on many platforms and I think by playing a few games you will easily see how we represent the various zonese, as well as the pros and cons of our current interface.

THe interface in Wagic is optimized for small screens. This means we show less information (picture/oracle text are not shown at the same time unless you use tiny crop pictures).

We also have work in progress: counters for now are just represented as a text on top of the card graphics. This is barely visible and not good at all. An idea for me would be to represent them as a piece of "post it" paper, to simulate a gamer actually writing stuff on a small piece of paper on a card.

Abilities are not represented on Wagic, but I'm thinking a lot about it. A long time ago there was a discussion (was it on mtgsalvation?) about representing the major abilities (such as flying, reach, first strike, etc...) with easy-to-recognize icons on top of the card graphics.

"Basic" representation of the game are kind of easy: a 90degree rotation for tapping makes sense (until WotC comes to you for using such a patented technique, lol), representing an aura/equipment a bit above (and behind) the card it enchants as well.

I'm only covering the basics here, but if there are more specific things you'd like to discuss, I'd be really happy to hear about your own thoughts on the subject. Wagic really is in a specific position regarding the GUI because our main target are small screens. There are lots of limitations that go away when doing a GUI for a PC.