Hi,
WOW, thanks for the great review, I'm really appreciate it because I'm only a programmer without design background and you are helping me to understand the parts of puzzle I don't see well. So...
The font. This is the biggest offender...
I only see a way to make the font better is to make it 8x8, it should remove problems with e,x,l... lowercase letters but in other hand this will reduce area for text editing from 40x22 to 30x17, don't want to do it :(. And it would be great If you find a way how to fix current TIC font. It's just 6x6 bitmap pictures.
The palette...
Yes the default palette is DB16 and you can change it from the Lua code (try to load palette.tic demo). Also I'm going to create a page where you can edit a cartridge meta info like title, author, description, screenshots for publishing and there can be small palette editor to change default palette for a game.
The UI...
Here I'd like to create config tool to setup gamepad buttons mapping, touch screen gamepad, default palette and colors for all the UI items, also with export/import to let other people use this settings. Great idea with hiding spritesheet in Sprite Editor to make canvas bigger, will try to do something.
Other small UI / UX / ease of use tweaks to add...
- You can use number buttons to play notes on SFX EDITOR. Will print keyboard keys on the piano.
- When you mouse-over the editor menu, change the text from current editor (e.g code editor) to where the mouseover leads (eg. sprite editor). New text in different color? - will do.
- Add similar hints to the Find/GOTO/Function menu on the right in code editor - will do.
- Add import/export of spritesheets and sounds - will do.
- Ability to scale the window up by a factor (2x, 3x etc) for high resolution screens. - it's already scales by 2x, 3x when you resize window or what do you mean?
- more exciting logo? - I would be grateful if you would propose something :)
I have plans to make a dedicated place to let people upload games and discuss in the future, but itch.io is also great place to do it while app is in development state.
So, if you want to help with design it would be great because I really want bring TIC up to a decent standard and let people make games and learn programming for free.
Thanks for the detailed feedback.