Development Log Week 40

After a fun week of UI brainstorming we now have to tackle the resulting pile of work. This isn't too interesting for either you or us but once finished we might actually be able to show preliminary screenshots of the game for the first time.

Martin

With a long list of UI tasks ahead of us, I started out with some of the basics, namely form handling. To get this right took me a bit longer than planned and it's not even done yet. But since you'll be putting in data into forms all over the game, this part should work reliably and as user-friendly as possible.

Michi

Just before I left Martin's office last Friday and headed home we created a long list with todos concerning the prototype design of the user interface. These todos kept me busy the whole week. I wrote a lot of stylesheets, added content to the site and played with the overall layout.

Besides these changes in the user interface, Martin introduced a new way of handling data on the client side as well. When we merged his code into the master branch all the components that haven't been ported to the new way broke. So I spent a while fixing these as well. This is also a task that I will continue to work on the next weeks.

We are spending lots of time on these changes and while we do it, we can't work on new features and the gameplay. While this will set us back a bit we are pretty confident that it will pay off in the long run. Handling the masses of data coming from the server is much easier now and instead of many buckets filled with data all over the game we now have a single one, a singe source of truth, and that helps a lot. For the technically inclined reader: We switched from many simple Flux stores to Redux.