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| Oct '98: Notes on the New
Interface Hello everyone! Over the last few months the Firaxis team has been working hard to tweak parts of the game interface and terrain. Based on a lot of internal review meetings and feedback from many Sid and Brian fans and our loyal website visitors (we thank you all!), we have come up with a new look for the game. The following screenshots show the fruit of our efforts! We ended up doing a lot of revamping, but the end result has been well worth all the late nights and weekends worked by our art department. We think you’ll find a game that is much more cohesive, understandable and of course, most of all, fun. We all agreed to start with the land—the representation of the Planet your colonists find after their harrowing escape from the Unity. We felt the terrain needed to feel a little more alien and a little less confusing. To that end, we worked on the color scheme so it was less earth-like, and then took off some of the unnecessary information conveyed by the terrain tiles so players could easily understand the map. We also added special terrain tiles for all the landmarks you can discover in the game, like the Monsoon Jungle, Garland Crater, and Uranium Flats, all with bonus gameplay effects. Units and bases got the once-over as well, with base icons unique to each faction and crisper units that vividly pop off the terrain tiles. Once we got the land where we wanted, we turned our attention to the interface. The original interface of the game could be resized and moved, much like standard Windows boxes. Functionally this was a cool feature, but few people used it, and the graphics for the interface were limited to tile patterns that could be stretched or compressed by the player. Accordingly, our first decision was to fix the interface in place at the bottom of the screen, allowing our designers free reign to create the cool 3D layout you see below. Once we were happy with the main interface, we needed to integrate the rest of the screens with the main display. After some thought, we hit on the perfect solution—why not use the main screen as the basis for all the other reports and popups that a player uses during the course of the game? This provides the player with a common interface that can be used in many different ways, and cements the cool hi-tech vision of the game. Now that these art changes have been implemented, we are turning our full attention to finishing this game. Brian’s pounded out dozens of new features and AI improvements, so that enemy factions now regularly beat up on our most experienced players. Our artists are at the ‘odds and ends’ stage (icons, report screens, and remaining Secret Project movies). And, best of all, we’ll have a demo for you, so you can try the game out for yourself, about 4-6 weeks prior to the game launching! Debugging remains the last major task, with SMAC well on its way to becoming the most fun, addictive, and richest gameplay experience in the history of strategy games. We hope you’ll have as much fun playing the game as we did making it. The screenshots below are mirrored in the Gallery.
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