Update # 4: Match Lobby UI.

Sunday 12 April 2015


First sketch of the pre-match lobby. I have a few concerns with this first initial design.

Design cues were inspired by games like Dota, League, and Fighting games like Street Fighter. I do wish we could fit the 'Huge central CO portrait that scrolls left and right to other COs' like how Dota uses, there's just too much other important information to show at the same time to have your single player portrait take up the center stage.

Not a whole lot of room for Team Chat, as you can see in the bottom left. This stems from the problem that CO. portraits cannot be smaller than those squares, so they take up a large amount of space. While we may only have 4 CO.'s at the moment, I plan on expanding this roster a great deal to the point that if the images are that large, some kind of alternative solution may be necessary as I'm not a huge fan of the scroll-bar. Search is nice to help alleviate that, but only works if you know exactly which CO you plan on being.

Super Combat Squadron will feature a map editor and custom user maps, so knowing the layout of the map you are about to enter is important, so the map preview takes front and center stage. Were this a 1v1 match, the banners on the sides with your teammate's CO portraits would not exist, and it would show you only you and your enemy. Right now the teammate banner colors should reflect their team color, and could use a bit more contrast.

CO powers are snug in the center of the screen. They change to reflect whichever CO you have chosen, and mousing over them/selecting them will bring up a tooltip that will explain precisely what they do.

My biggest concern right now is I don't like windows-looking scroll-bars, but I don't want to split the CO selection menu into another screen or something, so more room for CO's will have to figured out somewhere.

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