Hey all,
This is something that we're going to need to do sooner than later, and we may as well do it sooner than later. Basically we've got a version of the game GUI at the moment that has gone through a lot of iterations, and it's ugly but it works. There are a variety of things that are suboptimal for various reasons, though.
Either we just haven't had time to deal with an issue yet, or we haven't figured out the best way to do it because we're engineers rather than designers. And from a designer standpoint -- Blue, that is -- the game is so freaking complicated that it's hard to have her come in and make it more usable without stripping away important pieces of function. More pretty? Absolutely, she can handle that.
Anyway, I'm reaching out at the moment to see who has interest in this sort of thing, and what sort of involvement you might be interested in having. All of our GUI stuff is open source and largely xml-based, so technically a lot of it can be directly modded if you're the sort who wants to directly tinker and try out ideas that we might then integrate. In other cases you might just want to look at what we're doing and say "here's what I love, and here's what I hate." Or even if you're just saying "I was immediately confused by this, and while I did figure it out after a bit, I think it's too confusing for new people."
We're also going to need some way of collating all this information from people, and working on a central design concept. In an ideal world that would be Keith or I... but, well, that's not our top skillset, to be blunt. Anyone who remembers arguing with me about control nodes knows this. The odds are fair that there's going to be too much feedback for Keith and I to directly be able to oversee all of it and make something coherent out of it, so having a volunteer project manager (or a couple of them) on the GUI focus group would help a lot in terms of telling us "do this, sillies!"
I think that a lot of what we already have in place isn't too bad, and the framework itself is pretty well engineered at this point, but there's still a lot of work to do and we're inevitably going to need help. If you think this sort of thing sounds like something you'd be interested in some level of helping on, then please let us know.
Thanks!
