After weekends of hard-assed JavaScriptin’ labour I found I had deserved a treat. In other words: redesign time, baby!
So I fired up the good ol’ Word 2007 (for new readers: that’s my vector graphics editor) and decided to give the intro screen and portal a repainting. The portal is where you end up after entering the site and it has the chatbox and your running games, and you can also join and create games from there.
There was also a small usability reason: I figured the fact that the portal’s left pane was blue could potentially confuse users about the fact that in the game, your left pane actually indicates your player color.
The redesign is kind of a blast to the past in a double sense, as I designed it to look retro-militarish, just like it did in the very first iterations. Boy do those early days seem long ago by the way! About the only graphics left from then are the basic tank and the green grass tile. I guess it’s fair to say building a multiplayer strategy game all on your own takes above-average persistence to! Above average? Freakin’ OCD is what it takes! Or at least an outlook on profit. Or on users... Or in my case, just a stubborn passion for envisioning and then creating stuff. Meh.
Anywhoo, here’s how the portal now looks:
The new portal look - retro army-style
Stylish eh? And yes it’s mis aligned but frankly, getting DIV margins exactly right is the one part of web development I can’t really get excited over, sorry.
I also played the first fully-functioning, start-to-end game with my good friend and patient tester Smieghtus. All the other times Dice Attacks broke his computer after about three rounds. But now it didn’t so it which gave him all the time to crush me, which he happily did of course. Maybe I should spend some time actually learning the game. But enough of the chatter – time for some in-game action!
Here’s a screenshot from near the start of the game, when things didn’t look that bad for me:
In-game screenshot
But things turned for the worse quickly… Yes that’s my last buildings you see exploding here, even though I tried to sneak in his backyard to make things turn:
In-game screenshot
(actually I should fix that you can just build anywhere but for now, everything that is not a browser-burning bug is a feature baby!).
And here is the sad, desolate landscape after the madness:
In-game screenshot
I know, I know, the outcome of war is never pretty.
