[biggerUniverse]

[ThousandKnives]

[white_door]

I agree that it should be new gui design. I suppose if built on top of an existing gui, maybe the old one could be posted too? With a set before and after shots.. People could then judge the changes fairly, compared to those that are from scratch.

Concerning 'ease of use', I feel one of the major factors is: how easy is it to use without reading any documentation. I mean if you have to read a design doc or manual just to understand how to use a GUI in a game, its not very easy is it?

I can understand that sometimes a gui in difficult to see in action from a still shot or two.. Especially if it uses a lot of animation to aid in the ease of use. A caption for each screenshot or a few lines of text would be one thing, but I feel anything longer than a paragraph might defeat the purpose of the whole ease of use concept.

As far as genre is concerned, surely we can credit people with enough intellect to be able to judge a gui on the merits of how well it fits that game genre?

Maybe the GUIs could be judged on: eye candy, apparent ease of use, originally, and uh.. dunno.

[Rainer Deyke]

I wasn't planning on entering this contest, but since I've just started designing the user interface for my new rpg, I might as well enter - assuming I can start working on the user interface immediately and it will still be accepted in the contest. I refuse to delay work on my rpg interface until the contest starts.

[Razor-X]

One thing which I don't understand is.... Anyone can just Phostoshop a GUI here... what makes it an RPG GUI shouldn't we actually TEST the GUI via program instead of captions? I mean some people are billiant with Photoshop.....

[Rainer Deyke]

Drawing pretty pictures is the last thing I want to do. What I'm concerned about is primarily how the player performs various actions in the game, and secondarily how the interface presents information to the player. As far as I am concerend, a text file describing which button has to be pressed to get which effect is as valid an entry as anything else. The point of this contest is design, not programming or painting.

That said, I am actually coding my interface. If we actually have this contest and my UI is accepted as an entry, I will enter a working prototype program.

[Razor-X]

Again, I still think there should be an actual executable available with the pohtos just to back up the results.

[janus]

Interface design has almost nothing to do with photoshop. You can throw shiny bevels on an interface all you want, and it'll still suck. Most modern games are actually a pretty good example of this ;)

I don't see why the interface design has to be playable. Some very good interfaces take forever to implement in code. If we're going to require a playable interface, we'll need to make this a long compo, and I think that'll have a major negative impact on it.

[Bjorn]

The plan is to make this a mockup contest, though it's nice to be able to show the GUI fully working, all that is really required are mock-ups, which can be made in Photoshop. Photoshop is just another tool to put down your design though, it's not going to make it for you.

Summer holiday started for me and today I finally arrived home again, my year of study abroad in Ireland is now over. I'll post competition guidelines and dates in the next few days. Meanwhile, feel free to discuss ideas about this, I'm listening.

About previous work. Your entry is allowed to be based upon previous released stuff, but should be new in its own right as well. So no screenshots of existing releases for example. :-)

[Rainer Deyke]

Is this still going to happen? My design is nearing completion.

[Bjorn]

Yep, whitedoor reminded me too, I've been slacking too much here. We're going to have it this week, see this thread for full details and post your entries there.