As you can see, the new character sheets are fully functional in-game. The active player’s sheet is made larger than the other player’s as well as fading out the inactive player sheets a little bit in order to emphasize the player who’s turn it is. The client playing the game is always first in the list, so it’s easy to keep track of who you are. The list is also arranged in the actual turn order so you can tell how far away your next turn is at a glance. Of course character sheets aren’t entirely done just yet, there’s many polishing touches that will have to be done later, but it’s a good foundation.

Stopping to make something functional with the display portion of the system was one of the few smart things I’ve done lately. A whole lot of things had to be changed to get it working properly that will affect future systems, so I saved myself some hassle of having to update them for the changes. Not only that, but being able to do something practical that is actually getting used in the game is a huge morale boost compared to spending months chugging away on code with no visible results.

Playing through the game with the new interface was interesting. Being able to easily see a comparison of player states made some things a lot more obvious than they were before (namely spotting exactly when and where another player starts falling behind). In general the game is more comfortable to play since there’s less in the way of missing information for players. It’s a valuable lesson to learn: for testing purpose having an ugly interface is fine, but just because it’s ugly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make sure it’s displaying all the necessary information for players.