One of the more useful things about getting MANIFEST in front of other people is discovering which parts of the game are communicating what I think they're communicating, and which parts absolutely aren't. The UI was one of those things. I liked the original interface. It was dark, dense, a little futuristic, and it gave the game a distinctive look. But after watching people play, there was a recurring reaction that I couldn't really ignore:
It looked AI-generated.
Because I'd landed on a visual language that has become very associated with AI interfaces: glowing cyan lines, translucent panels, rounded cards, gradients, floating information and lots of things happening simultaneously. And that's a problem for MANIFEST.
The game is supposed to feel like you're running a serious spacecraft operation. You're looking at trajectories, burn schedules, fuel reserves, crew, hull condition, cargo and delivery deadlines. It's a logistics problem wrapped in hard-SF spaceflight.
The UI should make that feel credible. So I've started moving it in a different direction. From "sci-fi dashboard" to "avionics suite" The first place I'm experimenting with this is flight authoring.
Here's the old version:
And here's the current pass:
The new direction is heavily inspired by the sort of information density and visual hierarchy you find in modern aircraft avionics. Not literally trying to recreate a Boeing cockpit, but borrowing some of the underlying principles:
clear instrument-like displays
restrained colour
strong hierarchy
fixed panels rather than floating UI everywhere
information grouped according to what you're actually doing
numbers and status indicators that look like they belong to a machine
less decoration, more instrumentation
The flight plan is now much more explicit.
You can see the individual stages of the flight, the burn, crossing time, fuel state and expected arrival, while the ship panel gives you a quick indication of whether the ship is actually ready to go.
There's also something I particularly like about this approach: It makes the player feel like they're operating the ship without actually piloting it. That's important.
MANIFEST isn't a space flight simulator where you're sitting in the cockpit steering toward Mars. You're the person behind the operation, deciding how the ship should fly and whether the resulting plan is good enough to dispatch.
So the interface should feel like a flight management system rather than a traditional game HUD.
Less visual noise. The old interface also had a tendency to make everything look equally important. That's fine for a screenshot. It's less fine when you're actually trying to make a decision. The new design gives the important information somewhere to live. Flight tells you what's happening with the current crossing. Plan tells you what the ship is going to do. Ship tells you whether the ship is capable of doing it.
And the map can go back to doing what it's good at: showing you where everything is and how the route fits into the wider solar system.
That's a much better division of responsibility. There's still a long way to go. This isn't a finished UI, and I'm deliberately not treating the current version as a final visual style yet. I'm using the flight authoring screen as a test case for the broader interface.
If this works, the same principles need to carry through the rest of the game: fleet management, ports, cargo, finance and the various screens where you'll be making decisions about your company.
The goal isn't to make MANIFEST look like a real aircraft simulator.
It's to make it feel like a believable piece of software that someone might actually use to run a fleet of spacecraft. That distinction is becoming increasingly important as the rest of the game comes together. And honestly, this is exactly the sort of change that I probably wouldn't have made without letting people play it.
Sometimes the most useful feedback isn't "this button is confusing."
Sometimes it's: "Why does this look like AI made it?" Fair point.
Back to the drawing board!