Upcoming Changes To Big Villain

Just recently I've fixed some problems with logging in or to be more accurate failing to login. But what I've got upcoming is code that checks to make sure a newly created player is correctly setup before letting him/her into the game proper. That will involve making the user choose how many secrets to keep in the game and which ones (some have higher VP values than others).

That brings up victory points in general. Obviously the real numbers are not even started yet, but the general idea is that scoring for a user will be done by giving out victory points for money on hand, number of clueless employed, number of minions, number of agents, vps for different lairs constructed, secrets of your own kept successfully until the end of the game, secrets of others revealed during the game, and evil schemes completed. Each of these will have a curved scale of some kind so you can't just sit and turn the crank in one category until the end of the game and expect to win. You've got to diversify and have some success in multiple areas in order to have a good score.

After I've got the setup completed then I'll be turning my attention to the operation that you run to find one of an opponent's lairs.

CSS Frustrates Me So Much

I'm just not very good with CSS and as a result I get a bunch of CSS like the four files that come from Yahoo! and my own CSS formatting interacting and I just can't quite get it to work. Sigh. I know I'll work it out eventually but in the meantime it's very frustrating to not be able to get things to look the way I want them to look.

On the upside though, I did manage to remove all the YUI JavaScript files and the YUI tab control I was using and replace them with the LivePipe UI one. So fewer files sent in order to display the Big Villain control panel means less data sent for every user and faster page loading too.

The UI - Now With 82% Less Eye Bleeding!

My first attempt at a UI for Big Villain was notable only for how incredibly horrible it was. The act of simply looking at it was enough to cause you permanent eye damage. So, finally I've got a new version of the UI that is quite a bit less horrible. It's still not anything that's going to pull people in because of its attractiveness, but at least it will drive fewer away than before.

First up is the new splash page, complete with nifty zooming thumbnails of the UI that you can click on to preview it before you sign up for an account.

Lastly we've got the new version of the control panel in the game. In addition to the better looking panels and background and a logo that no longer makes me wince every time I see it are the new icons on each operation. I wanted those in there for multiple reasons. One was that the UI desperately needed some color and variety. Another was that it was pointed out to me that when messages arrived, you often had no idea at the start of the game which of your actions caused them to occur. Now by tying the little icon on the message back to the operation it helps make that connection. I also was trying to give the idea of the elements on the periodic table of the elements with the boxed letters that symbolize each operation. After all, it's a game about mad scientists, it makes sense thematically. Hopefully in a later version I can make them more attractive, but for the moment these will do.

P.S. You don't have to tell me about the godawful baby blue color in the back of all the tabs, it's about to go away. Although I love the YUI controls, I don't want to pay the extra download cost of having YUI and Prototype/Scriptaculous in the game and I also don't want to fight YUI to re-skin the control to colors that I like better than these. Instead I'm just going to drop all the YUI stuff except for their great CSS files (for which Prototype has no equivalent) and use a Prototype based tab control instead.