Ocean color customization is now in the game! You can cycle through a bunch of color presets in the settings sidebar. Also, forgetting to save replays? Now the replay of your latest game will be available from the title screen!

Continue reading for a small update on the UI overhaul work.

UI Overhaul progress update

Ever since the start of this year, I have a pretty clear and rather grand plan for a number of features that will bring Konkr to the next level. The expeditions system, level editor, level statistics, player progression and achievements, customizable island generation, and more. One thing all of them have in common is that they will need a lot of new, often quite elaborate user interface.

So having all these plans in my head, I’m now taking the opportunity to really plan out how the UI that could support them all should look and behave. This currently means focusing on two things:

• user flows: What information and actions need to be available to the player on each screen? How should the layout of those screens be organized to make common use cases as simple, smooth and satisfying as possible?
• design system: Using all the current and future UI requirements as an inspiration, I’m trying to flesh out a semiformal system of reusable elements, colors, shapes and rules around using them together. This should make it easier to rapidly produce nice looking and consistent UI for all the new features I’m planning to add.

I’ll have more to share once it’s closer to final, but for now have at least a taste of some fairly rough mockups for potential new sidebar graphics.

The sidebar will continue to do a lot of having lifting. While I try to keep the main UI extremely simple, clean and intuitive, the sidebar is a drawer into which I stuff all the inescapable complexity the player may need to access. So I plan to at least make it feel a lot more like a physical drawer going forward. A magical wooden toolbox hiding all the little knobs and pieces you can use to get more fun out of the not-quite-board-game that is Konkr 🙂.