Devlog: Program Lead and UI

Good day to you, reader. My name is Anthony Klotz, and I am the Programming Lead for Club Crash. As lead, my responsibilities include checking in with my programmers and seeing both their progress in their tasks and how they are feeling about their contributions to the game and team. Along with those ideas, I will spend much of my time on the project doing peer programming: collaborating with another person through a programming problem or concept when it comes to programming. For instance, I spend a good chunk of time with my network lead, audio implementor, and shader programmer on their endeavors.

With the addition of our newest team member, Max Willman, we have been able to kick-start one of my favorite parts of development, UI. Max gave us a more accessible, features-based design for the UI. This means that the elements in the UI are designed to be understandable by a diverse range of people. This can be as simple as making sure that our buttons have a combination of color schemes that do not fall into common colorblind combinations, or making sure that buttons that do different things, such as in our character select, have different shapes to signify their different functionality.

Before Max joined our team, all our UI designs were diegetic menus, where the menu was reminiscent of the environment. For example, in Banjo and Kazooie's main menu, you select what save file you would like to play by selecting the event Banjo is doing. In our original design we wanted to incorporate that by having the menus feel like they are at a field event for finding clubs. Our main menu would follow you entering the area in which this event would be held; then, by selecting whether you want to join or host a game, you would be taken to a signup area. Finally, in character selection, you would be deciding what club you would like to represent by going to the booth of that club. All of this would have been in a 3D environment. However, after receiving some feedback from Max, we decided to change the selection of a character to be a more information-based 2D menu, with a 3D model of the club member you would like to play as.

My responsibility doesn't just apply to writing code for this team. One of my other major roles is to make sure the communications between our artists and programs are clear. In doing this I will spend a good chunk of my time speaking with our Art lead Maegan, to make sure that the team's vision is what cuts. This also means that I am checking in with my programmers to see if what they are working on follows the same vision as Maegan's and mine.

That is just a snippet of the things that I have worked on for now. I cannot wait to have you read our next blog post and see you at our launch which is approaching quickly on May 2nd, 2024. That is all I have for now; make sure to check back next week for another development log about my work in sound design.