1) Beauty in the sense of artwork is not important. Beauty in the sense of clean, smart aesthetics is. I believe in function, but "ugly" does not necessarily mean function.
2 & 3) I'm not a fan of the floating dialog boxes-as-interface model. There's too much stuff there, too many windows, especially the functionally useless but giant season schedule window. How about turning that into a hub, and runnin everything out of there?
For example, you say what stage it is currently -- no need to display the entire running schedule. Then have the entire menu there. There are not that many things to do, and they break down into a few categories:
- "Weekly tasks". Pulls up a window that gives you access to a few buttons for what you get to do this week. For example, "Scout Opponent", "View Standings", "Gameplan", "Continue Free Agency", "Manage Roster", things like that.
- "Almanac" -- lets you pull up season stats, awards, history that kind of thing.
I think that's about it. This blocks you from doing Almanac tasks and Weekly tasks simultaneously, but there's no need to have both full sets of menus open at once. I think that makes sense. Otherwise you're wasting clicks finding the right menus to close or open so you can get to the other ones you really want to reach. As a player, you are either in one "hub" or the other.
Within each "hub", things should be fairly integrated. There are I don't know, fifteen or twenty gameplan windows, none of which can be simultaneously opened. There has to be a better way, where you just enter the "Gameplanning" screen and you can flip through different aspects of gameplanning seamlessly, save it all at once, and exit back to the rest of your "Weekly Tasks".
It shouldn't be about number of clicks, but about organizing according to how people use the game. The interface and ALL those different windows are quite overwhelming.
4) The background is beautiful. I'm sure you could do different things with it, but it's not a priority for me. I honestly have never noticed lights on/lights off. I know the interface runs through the windows, and I just appreciate the beautiful artwork that's there in the background.
5) I covered my own thoughts above in a theoretical, no-regards-for-amount-of-effort kind of way. It sounds like probably a major overhaul, but the way I see it is more about keeping the function similar (i.e, what the user inputs into the game) but rearranging how all those different input screens are presented to the user.
Thanks for the thread, and great work you do with the game!
It'll definitely be interesting to see how the mobile landscape works. On the one hand cell phone games with advertisements and pro editions are all the rage. On the other, they're graphically intensive but otherwise vapid. I would suggest a solution may be to offload computation costs to central online servers (like a MMO game), while users can manage their teams from either ad-supported or paid mobile or desktop apps. That technology is completely there and could almost be accomplished with the current game and enough utility support.