Monday, December 17, 2012

Gridiron Solitaire #34: Team History

Last week, I discussed the Team History layout and how the beta testers wanted much more detail than was presently available (just team record and an acknlowledgement of how far the team had made it in the playoffs). That required an entirely new layout.

Layout is difficult, but it can be enjoyable. It's very, very interative: create a design, get feedback, tweak, think about it, tweak again. I must have gone through at least half a dozen layouts before I finally narrowed in on something I liked:


I'm very pleased with this layout (with the exception of reversing "Att-Comp", which has been fixed). Played/Simmed games are broken out, everything is easily readable, and those badges on top (which are just placeholders, for now) show how far you progressed in the playoffs (so if you make the playoffs, get a badge, and for each level you progress, you get an additional, distinct badge). Plus, the card incorporates the team's primary and secondary colors, which reinforces the team brand.

On each screen of Team History, there will be five of these cards, plus a sixth card that represents your overall franchise history. Here it is:



There are navigation buttons to move forward/back between the seasons, and this new layout gives you the ability to compare multiple seasons at a single glance.

So the layout has been changed, and the data has been captured and written to file. What's left is that I have to actually display it (everything you see here is just dummy data). The good news is that I know how to do this in a reasonably optimized way, and I'm hoping to put it all together this afternoon.

It's very grinding to do feel like I'm proceeding at a snail's pace, but everything I'm doing now is adding richness and flavor to the world that I didn't really conceive of when I started.

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