During the development I had to make some design decisions for the game GUI( Graphic User Interface ). My intention is to be able to have this Client be usable on various devices( Phones/Tablets/Desktop/... ) which means I had to rethink how the Lobby is viewed by the users after a successful login. I would like to in the future be able to add more relevant content for the Lobby and to do that I decided to go with the Tabbed Panels which you can see in the image below.
The idea with this method of navigation is that the buttons are large enough that on a small touch screen they can be easily selected while it still works well for Desktop computers. The added advantage is that additional tabs can be added as required with each tab containing content within itself with a decent size of canvas space to show the desired content.
As more progress is made over time this will change visually in that it will be cleaned up, other stuff will be added and things will get moved around. But the concept of the Tabbed Panels is the direction that I plan to move forward with not just in this area but also other relevant areas that have yet to be developed.
One of the challenges I was not anticipating but should have known better is the difficulty to export for Mac OS X and iOS devices, I was not aware that you can not directly build for those platforms from Windows 10 and have to do a lot of extra steps or pay for premium services to be able to use Unity Cloud which allows the user to upload the project and have it compiled on the Cloud and the result is given back. I'm still not sure what would the appropriate solution at this time as I need to do more research and I really don't want to have to buy a Mac laptop and iOS device but it is starting to look like I may have no option in that :(
The current Unity3D beta version of CSK seems to be running stable with a shortlist of minor things that need to be addressed but I am pleased with the overall look and feel of it.
I hope that you guys like it too and I know change is not always easy at first but this new method of navigation will prove to be far superior to the previous version in time.
Again for those who would like to help with beta testing on various devices please reach out to me as I am looking for a wide variety of devices and platforms to test on just to make sure it is working as expected.
In the future, I would really like to talk about other aspects of the project that I have been looking forward to in a very long time but that is for another days journal entry :)