Progress Report: The Visual UI and the Tooltips that Make It Work

Capital Command's HUD and interface are WYSIWYG: everything you see does something, and everything you can do is a button on the screen. Tooltips explain all the details.

CC is a complex game with lots of features and mechanics. I really want the player to understand and use all available tools to annihilate the enemy, but I also really hate long, boring tutorials. Beside being annoying, big tutorials usually end up trying to teach too much too fast. The predictable result is that the player will instantly forget half of what he learned, as well as how to use half of the rest.

Capital Command takes a different approach. The game does have a "prologue" battle, but it teaches exactly one new piece of information: that holding ALT unlocks the mouse cursor, allowing you to hover over the game's interface.

The UI is designed so that everything you can do in the game has a button on the interface. If you hover the mouse cursor over a HUD element, you'll see a description of what it does, how to operate it, and the keyboard shortcut to activate that functionality.

Of course, the prologue mission is designed for complete newbies, so it points out which parts of the UI are useful in various situations. But it's up to the player to ask "hey, what's that button for?", hover the mouse over it, and discover something useful, or at least cool, to do.

Advanced players may not need this functionality, and they will have the option to turn it off. But, on balance, I think it's more useful than it is annoying, which is all a tutorial can ever really hope for.

Well, at least, that's the theory. Looking forward to your feedback!
Thanks for reading
The dev