Game UI Design

I guess this game requires the same treatment dwarf fortress received: a better UI, some tutorial maybe.

This is the UI for civilization, correct? i didn't seem to be able to interact with the... game part of the game.Still, Civilization games have impressively complex UI, so even to approximate that is quite a task.

a lot of things would benefit UI wise if paired with game UI devs

That would be great. Each game usually features its own weird UI, with unique shortcuts, half-broken controls and plenty of design experiments - and yet users don't have any problem with learning all of this. A lesson for the UX people that users aren't as dumb as it's often said.

Anyone else sees this as an opportunity to design a better high-performance gaming UI?

I think your UI could use some work, funny enough. But I like the concept, it's just that the way the page and "game" works is not exactly clear.

Trying to figure things out in a game is fun! Trying to figure things out on a website is a sign the UI sucks.

I wouldn't say the UI/UX has been completely ignored. In fact, to a large extent I'd say it's been quite deliberately designed. The lack of "graphics" does not necessarily lessen a game, especially one like this (or like less complicated roguelikes). I've been playing roguelikes for years (decades?) and I think the text visuals are actually better than any tile visuals I've ever tried (and I've tried a lot of tilesets for the various games I've p

Our experience has been that the two things you're asking for---a shallow learning curve for learning to use a game's UI and a UI customized for each game---aren't compatible in practice. We arguably have the latter, a UI customized for each game, right now and it generates no end of confusion because users expect the UI not to change completely between game X and game Y. If you give the module designer broad freedom to alter the UI, then what you get are differences in game UI be

The interface is very much part of the design of a game!