The programmer's hell called "UI"...
For the past two weeks, Adam has been plugging away at the user interface of Gravitronix. He's had a tremendous amount of help from a friend of his by the name of Mike Folini after Adam called him in to help with UI design and creation.
Adam treats Folini with the same professional courtesy Dr. Frankenstein treated Igor. Luckily, Folini has adopted the zen-like stance that he should take nothing Adam says seriously anymore. It's a unique working relationship...
UI programming is a lot like data entry, which is typically taking piles of documents and entering their data into a spreadsheet (a task I have a great deal of experience with). It's not generally enjoyable because the outcome is always certain: you take the data, type it in and move on to the next piece of data. There's isn't a moment where you have to decide how you're going to do it and move forward. There's the data, there's the spreadsheet. Get it done.
That's what UI generally tends to be: you know exactly what you have to do and how to do it, it just takes piles and piles of time.
Most programming can't be made into an intelligible metaphor because of the sheer amount of freedom involved with it. You have a point A and you're responsible for deciding where point B is and how you want to get there. That's generally enough rope to hang yourself with if you're not careful, as you can lock yourself into one method of doing things before discovering later down the line that you're going to have to lift up the track you've placed and move it.
This at least makes the activity more enjoyable because there are unknowns and seeing your work succeed despite the unknowns is quite rewarding. UI doesn't grant as much of that.
But we're mostly through it, and the UI is looking quite nice while also turning out to be very intuitive (though the beta testers will have final say in that). We're adding some elements to it which should hopefully make setting up games with a mix of gamers and non-gamers drastically simpler.
If you've ever tried to instruct a bewildered non-gamer through a game interface (or even a gamer who isn't familiar with said interface), you'll know that it can add a significant amount of time to getting into a game, as they fumble around with selecting a character, entering their name or any other settings they must personally decide upon before gameplay can commence. God forbid, you're trying to instruct a parent or even grandparent through this kind of setup.
We have a solution which will hopefully alleviate that entirely, but we'll discuss that at a later time.
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