Hello and good day to the developer blog number three! My name is Sandor and I am programming the game!
Actually, today I had planned to present the European international cup competitions, but I postpone this to the next time. On the one hand, I'm unfortunately not ready yet, on the other hand, I want to present something that can easily get lost, but is nevertheless very important for a computer game: the UI framework! "What, dear Sandor, is that supposed to be?" some might ask. The answer is relatively simple: UI stands for "User Interface" and means the interaction between player and program. This is mainly about the graphical structure: How do you get to the menus, how can you select things and where very please can I actually buy a new striker for my dream team? Framework simply means a basic structure.
It's not as trivial as you might think. The first consideration was: what resolutions do I want to have for starting eleven, should a window mode be possible and what about borderless window mode? Player's Eleven had windowed mode, but only offered exactly a 1920x1080 resolution. The fact that you can't choose a window size was criticized by many players. Therefore it was clear to me that there should be a freely selectable resolution for Startelf, starting with a minimum resolution of 1360x768 pixels. The window mode will be there as well as the borderless window mode.
The next question with the resolution was now: What happens to the screen contents when the resolution is changed? Some soccer managers scale the image. So you see on the highest resolution the same as on the lowest resolution, there just simply downscaled. This is not a good solution for me personally: The font becomes more illegible and everything simply more unclear. The Football Manager, on the other hand, directly adjusts the game content: Lists become larger or smaller, texts are abbreviated, large graphics are replaced by smaller ones, etc. On the lowest resolution, the font is still just as recognizable as on the highest. This is exactly how I programmed my UI framework, which I developed specifically for Startelf.
A first challenge were dropdown menus. These should definitely adapt to the available screen size. This can be seen in the following example: When selecting the birthplace, a nested dropdown menu opens: The first image was created at a game resolution of 1360x768, the second at Full-HD (1920x1080). At the larger resolution, there are simply more entries displayed than at the smaller resolution.
So the screen is not simply scaled, but the UI elements adapt to the screen size.
The same principle applies to the next example: In the country selection list, sometimes you see more (larger resolution), sometimes fewer entries (smaller resolution).
And finally, you may suddenly need a scrollable list if the elements of a list no longer fit on the screen when the resolution is changed. This can be seen in the next two pictures:
Programming this framework was a bit more of a task. In fact, I had to rewrite the framework twice, so it is now at version 3.0. There were several things I had to adjust. The automatic creation of scroll areas, the determination of distances of the individual columns of lists to each other or the automatic positioning of areas, dropdowns or buttons did not work as desired in my first two versions.
With my framework it is now relatively easy to design new screens. The positioning, scrolling and spacing is now done automatically. This makes the future development of Player's Eleven much easier, because I now have a basic set of possibilities to quickly design screens.
This has kept me a bit busier than I thought over the past few months, but now I'm in the starting blocks to continue content development. My roadmap now includes:
1) Finishing the structuring of the European Cups (progress about 70%).
2) conception and graphical realization of the club area
3) conception and graphical realization of the stadium
How important is an appealing user interface to you? How important is it for you to be able to choose the window size freely, or do you prefer to play in full screen mode anyway? Please let me know.
Sporty greetings
Your Sandor