My new foray into Game GUI design took a bumpy side trip today, that rocky side street came in the form of, “philosophy” statistic. While making what should have been a rather simple “Edit Candidate” popup window, for the Political Machine. All seamed to be going well. I had everything in a expectable layout. With what I thought was a rather simple, and not to “Excel Like” Window. Everything fit together, just like a puzzle.

Than the trauma began. While pondering if there was anything missing form the window, The Evil One “Scott” Points out that Philosophy should not be listed with all the stats in the game that you have to pay for with points. (in that you don’t have to pay to be conservative, you just choose what you want to be.) this makes Philosophy much like age and race. So ok Ill just put it over with those to stats. Wait. Cant do that, Widows to small. Alright so I just make it a bit bigger. Now I have a bunch of white space because the Philosophy stat is to small. And back and forth. I just move it here, but... Well Ill change this like this. But... Well we can change the size of this, BUT……..

Then at the end of the day, as I have finally settled on something that works, not ideally. But works. Along comes Kriss, “Why don’t you put this here and this here” he says to which I reply “because I tried that and it wont work, let me show you!”. And that’s right, I showed him. What I showed him was that that did work better. And that he was right.

The moral of the story. Is Staring at something to long. You sometimes don’t see what’s in front of your face. And always, always. Get a fresh perspective whenever you have the chance.