I had got a plan to match the 9 bottom right buttons with the numpad on the keyboard, so you can use spatial memory to tap the right key. At many points in the game there would be fewer choices in this panel, so only, say, 4 buttons would appear.

The actual icon graphics are placeholders - I appreciate the need to make them distinctive, but I don't want to turn the UI into a multicoloured jumble. I expect the usability issues will come out once I have more gameplay code working.

The map is a thinly disguised hex grid to make it easier to add user made levels, there might be a larger scale world map you can bring up with more details about the terrain.

Thanks for all the ideas - I now have a useful checklist to help when designing GUI.


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I have mocked up the basic layout for the main screen, in the end it is not massively different to 100's other games.

On balance I decided not to go for a context popup chooser, instead having the main buttons always visible for a given task (in bottom right), and these change when you are in different modes - eg: Map, Combat, Town Management.

In the top left is the top level mode chooser, which can launch combat, economy stats, and the system menu.

At the bottom in the middle is a dynamic inventory/chooser panel which will display equipment/characters/buildings depending on the task at hand. To in the bottom left is the world map, which can swap out to a local map when required.

I am going to reuse these frames, and some more wooden style ones to mockup the rest of the more table/spreadsheet parts of the GUI eg: Inventory and Trade screens, then I can always smarten it up or add more custom graphics later once the GUI usability is on top form.

Started on buildings, on reflection I think 3000 polys is too many, and I'll leave more of the twiddly detail in the texture in future.

Only the red roof one is new - others are placeholder...

Ha! Thanks Plasticware Nightmare, I was paying so much attention to the keyframe positions I got my arms in the wrong phase to the legs. I'm glad I posted the video Also reminds me to preview the anim more often in more than just front/side views.

After a crash course in animation I got my musket soldier in engine. I am always surprised just how hard it is to do animation!







Now with some placeholder units working I can get back to making some buildings.

[working title]

Cool ideas, I would love to have mongol raiders as a playable class for some scenarios
The combat is much more raider/ambush focused rather than simple territory grabbing, so raiding is an important gameplay technique, and mounted lightning raids on villages and caravans are a good way to go about it - making a quick getaway before the colonial troops arrive!

I'll take "Spice Road" as a working title for the time being - I've got about 100 alternate titles I tried while thinking up ideas for this so I think I need to just move on and let my subconscious mull it over some more.

malec2b - I know what you mean, I am trying to stretch the genre's a bit. It is much more of a Tycoon game than an RTS, and also is quite a Sim. The actual trading is not too overbearing, with as much emphasis on diplomacy and combat.

So while the game remain officially unannounced I can still change the name, so what genre is Tycoon+Combat+Trading+Sim ?

  The setting is an alternate world, using the culture and technology of the Napoleonic 18th Century, but mixed in with the Medieval Silk Road feel - it is the world as it could have been if the naval routes hadn't killed the land routes.
  There are even a few shades of the colonial wild west of the same time period, especially when it comes to town building and roaming bandits.

Well you do have to defend yourself, and strike out new trade routes through bandit infested deserts and forests

[Spice Road]

Spice Road

Update 21-11-2013
Happy to say Spice Road is complete, polished and out the door! On sale now after a long and winding development.

http://www.aartformgames.com/games/spice-road

Update 24-09-2013

Check out the latest Spice Road video trailer & please upvote our Greenlight page!
Spice Road Video Trailer + Greenlight

Update 16-05-2013
For all Strategy/Town Building/Economic Sim fans, the Spice Road Demo is now freely available for download.

Free Spice Road Demo


Beta version available to Preorders:
New features in Beta 0.200 - 32 Upgradeable Skills and Abilities + Sandbox Freeplay Map Generator.

// Older post below

New Screenshots





Please feel free to critique anything and everything on my log, that's why I'm here

I am aiming at "18th century merchant trading in central Asia" as a theme, although it blends into medieval Spice Trail and Silk Road at times! I am going to try for a tactile GUI, but trying not to be too literal.

Here are some styles I am working on:



I want to add more of the carved metal designs to add variety to the frames, with different animal and plant motifs.

As for layouts, I think I am going to try and keep a flat hierarchy - so when you are doing a certain task all the things you want to do are immediately visible with minimal/no submenus, and anything unrelated to the task at hand is hidden away. Also windows will happily expand to fill the whole screen when doing tasks like unit management/trading to give lots of room for the important info and no clutter. This goes against the trend for lots of little popup windows, but I think it is worth a go

I am keeping in mind "What the player wants to see", "Where he wants to see it" and "How it should be displayed" as key design decisions.

Brice: I found Jakob Nielsen impenetrable, just couldn't find any relevant content! I've read GUI theory about button location, size, location and such - my problem is more with the gameplay flow and graphic design.

I've got a working prototype with placeholder GUI. I am trying to get the atmosphere and feel right, as well as coming up with good graphic designs for the border styles and buttons, as well as the font and icons. While I am fairly good at painting and 3D modeling it seems to be a rather different skill making all these pixel perfect 2D designs.

Well I guess it is easier to discuss specifics than abstracts so I will be back with some of my designs for critique

Different ways things are destroyed theme:

Rot, Filth, Shatter, Burn, Melt, Crush, Dissolve, Wither

These put all sorts of interesting demon ideas in my minds eye.

Just define exactly the gameplay you're going to have using a placeholder gui/debug info.

The more I get into the GUI design, the more I am having to make these gameplay choices and really lock down on the details of how it will play. I think once I have a decent plan on paper of how the gameplay works in the variety of play modes the GUI should slot into place.

Combat, WorldMap and Dialog are fairly straight forward modes to design.

Inventory, Party Management (6 Heroes and 100+ Workers), and Trading are the trickier areas, along with Quest Management. But although they are tricky I think it will help my game fun if these elements work well. I am hoping to automate parts of Party and Trading, perhaps once you reach a certain skill level you can hire a Quartermaster and Merchant Trader to do a lot of the repeated boring actions in these areas while the Player concentrates on encounters and quests.

There's nothing to stop me putting in an isometric camera mode too for Classic RPG fans, it will just use a 3D landscape and characters In fact it is a lot easier to work with 3D models as you can do lighting and animation quite easily, as well as customised versions of the characters (eg: taller/shorter, fatter/thinner, different hats and clothes on the same anim rig) So I would probably pick 3D characters even if the rest of the game was strict 2D isometric.

I added some vertex buffers and a shader to do the interpolation, and got a 10x speedup to 23 FPS. The next slowdown is creating all the animated matrices in the first place - I think I can do some simple optimisations to the number of multiplications, and perhaps convert to quaternions... in any case I don't think I will be needing 2D sprites after all Thanks for the tips!

Just remembered that mesh used software skinning. I am going to try rewriting that to use vertex shaders and see how much it improves by.

I write in DirectX, usually using vertex buffers - but again this anim code is quite old and doesn't even use those! No wonder it is super slow. I have a good feeling I can get the same scene running 10-20 times faster :D

Sadly my current engine sucks when rendering lots of animated models

3 FPS for 2000 animated meshes


With this many on screen they seem to blend into a big mushy mess and could easily be replaced by 2D placeholders in the distance - but perhaps I should just have less guys on screen and make the best of it.

In any case I am sure there is some optimisation I can do to fix the performance

Interesting concepts in that essay - but it sounds like overkill for gameplay - instead of modelling 10,000 people in a world, I would just model perhaps 20 leaders and let them cast the votes of their followers for them.

As for economy - a global heuristic approach is a more positive plan than a strict simulation. I'm thinking measure each towns 'success' as a score of good and bad events, then multiply by its basic potential productivity and divide by number of people there to give an average wage and tax yield. As a town gets more industrial/skilled the productivity goes up, and so does the average wage.

The events themselves would be on the lines of # Bandit Attacks, # Enemy Raids, Won # Raids Lost, Random&Seasonal Events, Amount of Player Wealth spent in Town.

Ideally the same system should apply to player and AI towns, keeping everything simple with clear cause and effect for player actions.

Interesting choice to keep the main 3D window visible in System Shock 2. Depends on how big the inventory gets.

  I've also been wondering whether to do the small square pictures for my items, or just have a little type icon next to a text name. There is a fair bit of trading & collecting in my game and you have medium sized squads of characters to equip - as well as being able to add equipment to buildings and vehicles.
  I like FinalFantasy games and Trading games that just use text names for each item because they are clear to use and allow a lot of variety with little effort - but I think the square pictures are more fun to play with - especially if similar items can stack.