Sunday, February 17, 2008

Modern Cypher's new interface.

I have finally got Modern Cypher (the game I am spending a few hours every Sunday working on) to the point where my revised user interface is working. I am thinking that the game is now far enough along (and is currently playable) that it is very likely that it will be ready by the end of this month and if not, is far enough along that I would not have too much problems putting it into the March release schedule. To be honest, all that is really needed at this point is clean up of the display and win detection officially implemented. I am planning on doing those things next Sunday, though if I am too exhausted by my Game in a Day challenge, this could slip.

For people who actually played with the earlier build from the repository, assuming there are any people who have, they will notice that the user interface has dramatically changed. First of all, the puzzle is presented in the middle of the screen in big letters, with the original cypher over top in smaller red letters. In addition, the original interface had up/down buttons for each letter for creating the cipher. This worked, but lead to the confusion problem of having multiple letters mapped to a single letter. The new interface requires that the player draw lines between source letters and the destination letter. This gives the player a visible view of how letters map to other letters, which I personally like a lot more than the rotating letters system used initially.

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