Most of today was spent improving the UI and mouse controls. I want the prototype to work out on both PC and console, but the only PC games I’ve been playing the past couple of years have been racers.

So I took inspiration from Gears: Tactics controls. I have been playing it on the Xbox but as the game is part of my Game Pass Ultimate subscription I could also install it on my PC. I modified my user interface to follow some of Gears’ concepts, making it a lot better already:

• there’s a list of the player’s characters on the left, highlighting the currently active character
• there’s some character context information in the top right – currently only the name
• whenever you hover with your mouse over any character, the context information will update
• an outline gets added to the character you hover over
• you can either use the buttons on the left or click directly on a character to switch the active character

Of course it’s all placeholder, I only show the character name and use simple UI buttons that change color, but its the basis for converting everything to nicer, better controls later on.

Another small addition I made today is allowing the player to navigate the camera by moving the mouse against the edges of the screen. I’ll probably add some mouse based rotation at some point as well, but overall it’s already much more mouse-friendly.

You can see the results of the day in the Youtube below.

Gamedev Diary Knock-On Effect