Communication 04 - Menu Reworks
Hello carrom fans,
As a part of our focus to refine the application itself, the menus and user experience of the game are getting the focus during this round of updates. This includes a full rework of the menus to fix user experience issues, support upcoming features, and real time customization.
First, what menus are changing? The whole flow of the application is changing more like to what v1.2 had. The landing page 'play' button will put you right at your own board, ready to warm up, host a lobby, or play against bots. A big thing is we have moved from 'seats' to a menu managed player lobby. This puts the player and team management in a single, easy to navigate menu instead of the seats (which can get off camera or be clicked accidently!).
There are lots of motivators for this UI update. Between user feedback (thanks!) and having to use it myself, there are plenty of things to note. After some planning and research, it became clear that a full UI & UX rework was in order to best achieve the results we wanted. As a result we have much more modern menus and a more modular approach to our backend to accommodate it.
As far as features that are coming along with this rework, the best is real time rules management and customization. Now, when making your 'rules' the board, pieces, and physics respond in real time! No longer do you have to set, save, try, and repeat to get your perfect custom rules. Striker customization also benefits from this real time editing.
We also wanted to implement some better ways of managing some files in the game (this includes files for rules, starting positions, training sequences, customization configurations, and more) such that they're easier to manage from in game. This includes a menu that allows you to enable/disable these from showing up in the rules list or randomize scenarios, as well as deleting the custom user files that are no longer being used.
This update comes with some nice tools too, so maybe we'll cram something neat in there before release? The release window is still a big unknown, but we're always looking to put the best product forward. You'll have the newest, coolest version of Carrom Slam! in your hands before you know it, it's not like this will take us years.
As a reward for reading this whole thing, here's a really rough copy of the main menu. I know, I spoil you.
[ 2025-02-04 16:48:58 CET ] [ Original post ]