Talk to me about customization [of the UI]: changing colors, brightness, moving things around. How far are we looking to take this, are there technical limitations, and how important is the ability to customize the UI?
TL;DRCustomization will likely start with accessibility options like colour blindness and text size, then item-tied UI styles, with broader player customization coming later and not yet designed.
Well, there's two levels anyway. There's in-lore customisation, as in how you'd actually customise your ship. That's a bit beyond the scope of what I know about. But we also talk about accessibility as well. So the size of text, colour blindness and all things like that. As a systems programmer, I have to deal with that kind of stuff. We're building all that in anyway because we have to do appropriate things for colour blindness and text sizes so you can read things and not just have tiny text everywhere. But that really helps the game designers as well, because the game designers will talk about how we want to be able to customise our ship or we want to be able to customise the way a shop looks or something. From a systems point of view, which is what I'm involved in, it's just about trying to make the UI as flexible as possible so then we can do that sort of stuff. I don't know where we're at with the design for customisation, particularly ships. Obviously, the ships are the most important things. I mean, Yogi showed quite a lot of that stuff off at the show, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, I think at the moment there's more that we can do as well. A lot of the customisation at the moment is things like on the MFDs, you can choose which MFD you're looking at, that kind of thing. For now, our main focus is to take all that information and get it good for the player, and also try and get it contextual. So you're not seeing things you don't need to see. So while for now you can't customise everything to a great deal, it hopefully is a better player experience. And I think longer term, we've always talked about, say, if you buy a new helmet, maybe it has a different style of UI. If you've got a different mobiGlas, maybe you've got the pink version, for example. I think tying things to items is probably going to be the first thing before we get to the level where we're letting players customise every single piece here and there.
Yeah, I think the customisation will probably manifest itself first in the accessibility options, like for colour blindness and text size and things like that, and then anything beyond that is probably later down the line.