I’ve been going over the fundamentals of the game design and figured the first thing I needed to do was finalize a basic UI layout. 

Ended up brainstorming a bit with John Kelly on things and we threw a bunch of ideas back and forth. Most of what we came up with was based on the games we think kick ass. Such as Escape Velocity, Endless Sky, Star Control, Wing Commander III, Subspace, Solar Wind, and all those other wonkily-awesome 2D space games of yesteryear. 😀

Seeing that this is a sequential system (not an empire builder or money-management style game), I wanted to keep things simple and clear, so we focused in on doing just that.

Here’s the basic UI for the main space-game view.

Next up is the chat screen. The game is going to be loaded with dialog, since the idea is to bring my readers into a story that resembles the universes of mine they’ve been reading.

The layout had to be nice-looking, but it also needed to give me room to write a bunch of stuff without the player having to scroll a bunch.

We haven’t mucked about as much with just your standard menu system, but that’s probably not going to be much different than the style of the UI above. 

As an aside, most of the stuff in the game comes from CraftPix.net. I love their stuff. I know it’s used on a number of games, but I don’t really care right now.

When it comes to making the version of the game for my Platoon F series, I’ll likely look for an artist who can help bring that to life. For right now, though, Sector Defector is going to look nifty using as much premade stuff as I can manage. Why? It’s not because I’m cheap, it’s because I really love the artwork I picked up from CraftPix! haha

Progress

• Got the basic layout of the UI in place.
• Decided on the graphics I’ll be using for Sector Defector.