Welcome back! This is the second dev blog for my game, The Great Beyond.

Last week, I explained what the game is about, and even went into details about the user interface. One of the main reasons for this is because I feel that the user interface, particularly in simulation games, is one of the most important aspects.

I tend to do a lot of research on various tycoon, RTS, and simulation games. I will look on Reddit, various YouTube channels, and Steam, to see what other games are being released. The first thing I look at is the user interface, as this is a big factor when deciding whether or not I will play the game.

Admittedly, the user interface in my game is what can be described as ugly but practical. The original idea was to have a rectangular bar across the bottom, which would have the time controls on the left, and the building options to the right, with stats for the game displayed on the top of the screen.

The problem was that you had to move your cursor to the bottom of the screen, and open up a tab in order to find the buildings. So I decided to go for a simpler approach.

By this point in development, I had decided that I only wanted 9 buildings. (Which has since been expanded to 12!) Seen as there were going to be so few buildings, it was here I realised that the most suitable option would be to adopt the style of user interface from the original SimCity, 1989. A simple rounded box on the side, where there are no tabs to open, AND, your cursor would simply need to move to the left of the screen, rather than dropping to the bottom.

In this process, I removed a lot of extra staff hiring and management tabs, which would have appeared in the bottom bar. Instead, all that is left is the time controls, which has been moved to the bottom-left instead of bottom-centre.

I then placed the money counter and power bar under the build bar, because you would need both of these when determining what you can build.

One thing I kept doing during testing was forgetting to send my soldiers up to battle! Firstly, I added the flashing orange warning sign to the top corner of the screen, which warns the player either if daytime is approaching or night time is approaching. Then, I removed the alert system. Originally, the player would control when the soldiers would go up to battle and return, but I realised that the simulation underground was too time consuming and distracting. I decided it would be better to automate this process. It also meant that I could reduce the size of the user interface, by getting rid of the alert mode buttons!

Lastly, one of the issues I kept having was not knowing what was happening in my base, and why certain parts were failing. So I added user and worker counters to each room entrance, so that you can see how many workers are busy inside of a room, and how many are simply using the room. For example, a canteen may have one working chef who is serving food, and six users eating in there.

I also added the news announcement bar, to pop up news stories. This includes, “You don’t have many toilets in your base”, and “a user has quit because they could not eat.” The most useful one I have found is the one that warns me when users are waiting in the canteen for food, and there isn’t any!

Another long post! I am making these quite long because I don’t plan to do that many- I hope to have the majority of the game finished by the end of the summer holiday.

Thanks for reading.