Thousander Club Update: July 2nd

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 139.75 (current year) = 402 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 57 (current year) = 673 / 1000

Last Friday, I left for Ohio and will out of town for most of this week. I have my laptop with me, so hopefully I’m working hard when not visiting with friends and family.

I’ve spent some time looking through the Guichan library. Even if I don’t decide to use it in my projects, and I see enough in it that encourages me to incorporate it, I can still get a good idea how to deal with a GUI.

I’ve also been thinking about getting Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design for Programmers:

UI is important because it affects the feelings, the emotions, and the mood of your users. If the UI is wrong and the user feels like they can’t control your software, they literally won’t be happy and they’ll blame it on your software. If the UI is smart and things work the way the user expected them to work, they will be cheerful as they manage to accomplish small goals.

Now I know why I have been feeling like the UI is important enough to spend so much time on it. If I don’t get it right, it will be a huge problem. Getting it right would mean that people won’t notice it. At first, it sounds bad, but people shouldn’t notice the UI. It should just be. If they notice it, something is wrong.

I don’t want to keep my implementation of a slider. It works, so I’m happy that I have the functionality, but it’s not very useful outside of this project, and ideally I should be able to take everything I learned from this project and move it to another. Unless I find something better, I am going to incorporate Guichan into Killer Kittens.

Hopefully I’ll have something good to show off when I get back from Ohio.