I started by mocking up the windows you’d see on the title screen. I remember Zach liking the last mockup but wanting to move on to the next thing, which was interfaces like windows and buttons for the main game. I think this was a pretty interesting look, but as I’ll relate later, this too was ultimately abandoned. So I used airplane and space ship dashboards as my peg and combined it with with the art deco look to create a more “serious” looking console. Previous mockups were a little too gaudy and Zach rightfully though that they didn’t look like they were designed for use in a scientific/engineering institute. This was the last mockup I made that utilized this art deco look. I took my cue from them and the art deco designs they seemed to be inspired by. The setting of Spacechem is in the same distant future imagined by science fiction writers in the middle of the 20th century. This concept sketch fleshes out that idea and also explored some ways that the buttons on the console might look. Zach decided that the on-screen stuff, meaning the grid and input/output screen looked ok for now (ie as it looked in the original screen he sent me) and that maybe we should focus on the console first.įrom the beginning the basic idea of this “reactor view” UI was that the player was looking at a console, or a computer screen that had buttons on the bottom that the player would manipulate.
Ultimately it wasn’t working out and I think we were both getting a little frustrated at this point. I think Zach particularly disliked this mockup, though again the reasons really escape me. My thought process was that this would help make the player feel like they were using some sort of computer console. I forget the details, but the last image didn’t quite cut it, so I went off looking for inspiration somewhere else, this time from the famous Apple Lisa GUI. The marks on the sheet are what I imagined marker lines would look like when engineers would draw on them. He suggested I take a look at the forms that military engineers and artillery men use to use as inspiration, and this is what I came up with. He didn’t want players to feel like they were playing a game, but rather that they were actual reactor engineers working for spacechem. From the beginning Zach always stressed that he wanted verisimilitude. This was my first take at creating a new look for the GUI. As with most things however, that was not the case. Spacechem players will notice that for the most part, it is fully recognizable and it seems that very little changed between this and the final product. The image above was the GUI of Spacechem as I first saw it. However seeing as there’s a small resurgence of interest in the game since the recent “hat promotion” via Steam and TF2, I thought this would be an opportune time to finally talk about how Zach and I came to the GUI that we did. I’ve been meaning to do a post about creating the graphics for the game Spacechem for quite some time now, but the time and energy it takes to generate coherent sentences has been quite rare as of late.
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