The Texture of a Caramel Left out in the Sun

Over the past [time frame spanning more than a week but less than a month], I have been looking to make the user experience functional. So far it’s going well.

This is where I started. I have a shape, and some buttons. But it looks atrocious. Too many clashing colors, and who uses chartreuse as a font color (hint: it’s me). But the format works, and what you see is the furthest out horizontally the menu intrudes on the drawing area, so that’s a plus.

Boy, who keeps picking these stupid colors. It’s a little difficult to see which tab is highlighted along the menu. Plus, I want to use a colored background for the drawing area, and gray is neutral enough that the cameras can’t color that on their own via overlap. So this gray has got to go.

Finally. Progress. This only requires a bit of smidging to fix the little bugs in it, but I think we have a real winner.

So, I scaled up the window size, and the room size, along with modified the background color a bit. I also adjusted the drawing window area so we won’t overlap either the menu or the title bar. The gray background is a nice touch, as both the walls and the cameras really show up, making the user experience easier. The inside of the room, without any cameras in it, is white, which allows the user to see there is no vision in that area. Blank. Empty. Nada. And then the room slowly gets filled with more color as it goes.

My next steps include getting these buttons to actually do something and not just look pretty, and clean up my code, which is about as messed up as the first menu color palette. Maybe I should have tried to write separate classes and methods at the beginning instead of, well, not doing that.

Hopefully I can make good progress on this as the week goes, but who knows. Right now I’m just proud I have a visible, usable gooey.