Hello I am Quinn Huhnke and I am one of the programmers on Curse of Janksbury. I am responsible for the user interface along with parts of the player movement. In this dev blog post I will be focusing on the user interface part of Janksbury.

The user interface consists of menus and what you see on the screen when you are playing the game, such as health bars. When  you start a game you usually see a user interface in the form of a main menu. For example this is what our main menu currently looks like.

As you can see it has the usual selections that you can scroll over such as options, credits, and the new game button. User interface in games is an important part of the creation of games as it can explain different aspects of the game just by existing on the players screen.

When you get into Curse of Janksbury you will quickly notice the user interface in the first sequence which gets expanded in the second sequence.

This is a picture of the development user interface which has things to help identify memory or fps related bugs but in the playable build you would only see the UI for the pause menu in the upper left and the player stats in the upper right.

The UI in our game is designed to be explanatory just based on the color and icons alone. We have a heart and the color red for health as that is what most people associate health with due to past video games and real world examples like the Red Cross. Below that we have the Jankify Energy bar which is shown by the gun icon and the purple color. Purple was chosen due to the shots fired by the player being a purple-ish color. The last item is a sprint bar shown by a shoe and the color yellow. The color yellow was chosen due to the color being associated with speed and bees, which are also fast.

The pause menu is the last user interface that we currently have in the game. The pause menu stops the game when it is open and has similar options from the main menu. The controls and credits are available along with a button to exit the game and a button to restart the current sequence, in case you get stuck somewhere.

The programming behind all of these menus can basically be summed up like a game of telephone. When the user interacts with different things the user interface receives the message of interaction and updates accordingly. For example the user starts sprinting the sprint bar slowly ticks down, the user takes damage the health bar goes down, or if the user uses the jankify gun then the jankify bar goes down.

Now you know all about how the user interface in our games looks and how it works. We hope that the user interface looks good and explains the game in the clearest way possible for everyone to be able to enjoy our game in its final state.