The combat system in War Worlds is coming along slowly but surely. It’s actually taking quite a bit longer than I was hoping, and that’s a shame because I don’t really have much to show until it’s largely in place.

But one thing I like to do when working on something that takes a long time is to break up the monotony with smaller tasks that I can finish in less than a day, just to keep myself motivated.

To that end, I’ve been working a bit on the UI for War Worlds, trying to nail down a cohesive “style” for the whole game. As it says right on the home page, I’m no designer, so I want to make sure the style is easy for me to actually build.

For example, here’s a couple of in-game screenshots showing of the new “dialog” style:

It’s not 100% perfect (there’s a lot of alignment and padding issues for example), but I think it’s a start. One thing I’ve noticed is that I think it’s actually kind of similar to Google’s Ingress:

I will say that I was doing this style before Ingress was released, though :)

As I said, I’ve tried to make the style easy for me as the designer/developer and to that end I took a few short-cuts:

• Most of the UI elements are just stock Holo: edit fields, sliders and so on,
• The bits that are custom are all just simple lines and shades of blue,
• A lot of elements are re-used (i.e. the buttons have the top-left and bottom-right corners chopped off, and that “theme” is used by the dialogs, drop-down lists and so on.)

I’ve thought about getting the help of a “real” designer, but the problem with that sort of thing is I’m not sure how to go about payments. At this stage I really don’t want to pay anything at all, because the game is already very much in the red (mostly hosting costs for this blog) and I don’t want to get any more in the red than I have to. I also wouldn’t want there to be any question about future payments in case the game becomes successful (not very likely, I know). To that end, any designer I do get would need to be paid a fixed price up-front.

So I think for now, I’ll just stick with my crappy art skills. If I ever make enough money off the game to be able to afford a proper designer, then I can revisit the idea of a professional taking a shot. Unless someone feels like doing some pro-bono work!