[Solecismic]

I have one real design philosophy with these products. I want to minimize the number of clicks it takes to perform a specific action. That was really the only priority with software design back before many of you were born.

But one thing I hear more and more is that people don't like the interface. I hear it enough that I want to think about more major changes I can make in the future.

I want to break this down into categories. I'd like people who post here to be as specific as possible in their responses.

1) How important is true beauty?

The ancient Greeks were all about aestheticism. The journey was far less important than the destination.

I'm not sure I can do a lot here. Artwork requires money, so I have to do a lot of it myself, but a couple of people with real talent have expressed interest in working on future games on a percentage basis. So there's room for improvement. I have no talent myself, but I can follow instructions and I'm better about not ruining things. I'm also much better with programming with drawing resources than in the past.

Some things I feel are important. While programs on tablets and hand-held devices are full-screen and tightly managed, I think a game like Front Office Football should be windowed on Windows.

This means that one of my goals is to make many of the windows (screens) in Front Office Football non-modal. That way you can have two player cards on the screen at once. Or look at a depth chart while you have the team summary up. That kind of thing. It's a huge development effort (and, really, one that teaches concepts that will be valuable on tomorrow's devices), but I think it's worth it.

As an aside, since a lot of people ask about FOF on a device... it's not possible without greatly reducing the memory requirements. FOF stores too much information. At some point, a smoother cloud experience and faster transfer rates will make this issue insignificant, but today's devices are designed for complex graphics displays, not complex computation-heavy resident programs with a lot of data. I spent months last year learning Android, and becoming immersed in new concepts (like a program having to re-create itself constantly while the device manages memory). At some point, PCs will evolve into something different and these concepts will become transferable to games like FOF. So I'm watching, but the technology isn't there yet.

My other main priority with beauty is that the FOF universe is built on having access to vast amounts of data. To take full advantage of that universe, most windows (screens) should be boxes crammed full of numbers that have meaning only taken as a whole. The best way to do that is still my basic custom ListView, with the alternating highlight colors and an Arial-type font.

Becoming more non-modal takes advantage of why Windows is still a far better place for FOF than a device (even if the memory issues with devices weren't present).

So what I'm asking is when you say you want more beauty in FOF, where would you add it? What would you change?

2) I feel like I've stepped into the middle of the Labyrinth and I don't know which way to go.

When you open all the FOF menus, you have access to 100 or so screens right from the main menu. It's overwhelming, but it fits the design goal of minimizing clicks.

Is it worth adding a click or two to better organize these menus? Or is this a good idea, but it needs better presentation? More menus? A field on each menu explaining how the menu is organized?

The main menus are the core of FOF interface - a mostly flat structure. But is this the reason you find the game ugly?

3) Let me go, Daedalus, I won't fly too close to the Sun.

One of the things I tried to do, mainly in introducing the calendar (remarkably ugly when FOF 7 first came out - what was I thinking), was point people toward what to do when they first played FOF. Get people to the New Game window, make it easy to start a new career.

Is part of FOF's interface issue that more should be done here? Should the new game window be replaced with a series of screens organized like a wizard (each field on the current new game window separated into its own window, and you're asked about each - kind of like what Civ II did when you started a new game).

4) Hey, Pygmalion, she's still just a piece of rock, after all.

I've always focused my art budget on the background screen. In earlier iterations of FOF, it conveyed what I think of as the central theme of Solecismic products - a playing field built into your work desk. FOF is nothing without your imagination.

So I've always wanted that image at the center of the product. The background screen only changes when you're in a universe (lights on) or when you first open the game (lights off).

Is it time for that to change? Most games use the background to convey information. Would FOF's interface be improved if the background has "panes" depicting statistics or your record or your roster? If so, what about the menus that lead you toward functions? You're adding a lot of clicks here.

5) Preserving those Halcyon days of winter.

In general, what I'm asking is what would you do about the interface, given that FOF's appeal and advantage is having access to a wealth of information about the football universe it creates.

What do you hate about the interface, and how would you address that without harming what attracted you to the game in the first place?

Thanks for your thoughts.