UI, short for user interface, is a tool for the user by the developer to interact with a piece of software, or in this case, my game.

All great games such as Mario Kart, Brawlhalla, Minecraft, and more, come with great or at least decent UIs, and I didn’t want mine to be any different.

As the player opens the game, I want it to run like this:

Splash Screen– shows the name and logo of the game’s developer/publisher (me) and fades out after 3 seconds.

Start/Title Screen– tells the player what button to press to actually start/play the game and shows the version number like in Mario Kart…

The Main Menu– has three buttons to play the game, options for stuff such as music, and to view the credits.

The Play Button takes the player to the New or Load options for creating or loading a save file.

The Options Button helps the player control different things such as the volume of music and more.

The Credits Button which the player can use to view the credits.

The Character Editor– this is where the player can choose 1 out of 10 skins to play with.

Once the player has decided what skin to use they spawn into the world in their house.

There’ll be HUDs, short for Heads-Up Displays, on the screen such as the inventory, health bar, hunger bar, energy bar, panels for displaying the amount of money the player has, the day, the month and more.

Like the geek I am, I’ve created concept art for most of these but keep in mind that these are just ideas and aren’t official…

I’ll continue to work on more concept art until I decide what the UI will look like.

So far I’ve just been talking about UI design– how ‘bout UI development.

Unlike most other indie game devs, I’m not using a game engine, I’m using a multimedia library called raylib (it’s stylized like that).

Engines usually handle everything from importing assets to getting something up on the screen to physics to creating UIs or make them easier to tackle. I’m gonna have to build everything up from the ground since I’m using a library.

I plan on just designing the UI in Adobe Illustrator or another program, storing the data such as the positions of different elements like buttons and text in a text file, exporting each element separately, importing them into my project, and create the UI according to the data stored in the text file.

I plan on using the same workflow for maps, environments and levels.

Sorry, this devlog came out late, I’ll try to release a devlog once every week.

Thanks for reading and stay alert for the next one.