As usual, time flies by and my last update has been roughly a month ago, but no, I haven’t been lazy, and so here are a few new screenshots from the current development version of “Phase 2” (thumbs, click for larger view) :
As you can see, the game is looking more and more finished with each new batch of screenshots. One thing you might notice is that I switched over to a different font compared to the older screenshots / videos. The main reason for this was that the old font, although it looked pretty nice and was fitting the game’s theme, didn’t include lowercase letters. Actually, the lowercase letters were just scaled-down versions of the uppercase letters. And so a forum user over at delphigl.com said that he found the text hard to read due to this, and after thinking about this, I realized that he was totally right. So I sat down almost a whole weekend and tried out dozens of different fonts until I found one that looked good, was easy on the eyes, easy to read, included all necessary characters (there are plenty of nice fonts that don’t have special chars, or lack certain chars) and also kinda fitted the game. So the new font should increas usability again, as it’s now much easier to read through longer text passages, and also looks kinda futuristic, perfectly fitting the games theme.
Other than moving over to the new font I also added a news ticker to the top bar, which shows all messages for the current turn and also marks them as read. Clicking on one of the messages will open up the corresponding window or region. It’s pretty much the same as the message list in the information center, but since that window is no longer shown at the start of a new turn (as it was the case in “Phase 1”), I decided to add this news ticker for people that don’t want to check the information center all the time. But if you don’t like it, it can be switched off in the nation-specific settings (so each player can decide this for himself). And while including this option, I also added other nation-specific UI options, like the scale of the flags on the globe.
So Projekt “W” is (slowly) crawling towards a release, step-by-step…
And last-but-not least a (positive) personal note : I recently got a new job as a software engineer pretty close to where I live. And believe it or not, we’re working with Delphi (XE2) there! So currently my daily routine looks like this : Get up, code on “Phase 2”, go to work, code with Delphi XE2 on work-related projects, get home, continue working on “Phase 2”. That’s what I call a nice change, especially compared to my last job.