Laziness and GUIs

Minimalism has certainly been an emergent theme on the internet recently. Gone are the cluttered websites of the past with content spilling all over the place, and in their place are cleaner and more organized looking sites. This is great for people as lazy as me, because it means that less work needs to go into a design to make it look good to the general public. Minimalist GUIs are simple to make and they look gorgeous when done right, so that's what I hope to do with Air: Force.

Whilst Air: Force's GUIs won't be written in HTML and CSS like the designs of most minimalist websites are (ROBLOX has its own GUI engine where you utilise instances) certain recurrent themes do emerge; such as basic colour palettes and organised layouts. The less clutter the better.

You can check out the game so far yourself - you have to install the client engine for ROBLOX, but it shouldn't take up much room, and if you don't intend to use it again you can just go ahead and un-install it afterwards - if you want through the link above, or just take a look at these screencaps if you want to be boring like that.

If you don't develop on ROBLOX yourself then some of these images may seem a bit alien to you. Quick explanation: the 'Explorer' pane to the right of the screen illustrates the hierarchy of all the game's instances, the 'Properties' pane below it displays the properties of any selected instance(s), and the big screen that's more or less in the middle shows the game 'world' itself. The 'Output' pane below it shows error/debug messages for testing the game.



Click on an image to make it larger.

A blank view of the initial loading screen.

The loading screen in action.

A gorgeous colour palette.

As you can see, the GUI isn't cluttered. There are hardly ever more than 4 colours on screen at once, which helps keep things looking simple and clean. The blue/grey matches the idea of aviation and combat (it's a mix of gun metal grey and stormy sky blue) and the highlights of a more toothpaste/cyan colour pop in contrast.

Because GUIs are dealt with as objects of data that are then transferred into pixels on a screen by ROBLOX's rendering engine it is very easy to overlay and use ZIndex manipulation to perform elegant GUI trickery. Two cyan lines on the Blue-Grey background? The background invading the Cyan? Nope. A simple overlay of a smaller bar on top of the cyan bar that matches the colour of the background.

As you can see, GUIs are a heavy focus for me. To make a good game the interface needs to be good. It should be obvious, because it's what a user interacts with (sort of the definition of interface), but many games don't have something that feels smooth or clean enough to really 'bond' (if that's the right word) with the user.

Let's hope it looks better than MySpace did, at any rate.