Don't underestimate UI design!

I've been working on this little project for several months now, and it's already been quite an education.  Currently, I have about 10 minutes of gameplay generated that will be the basis for the demo build that I'm still hoping to have out in the early spring.  I'm hoping to expand on that content before the demo launches.  Lately, my focus has shifted somewhat to the user interface.  It's easy to take for granted how important a good interface is.  

Until now, I've concentrated on character design and plot, game mechanics and artwork.  These are all things that will be in the player's face while playing the game.  The user interface, if done properly, should melt away into the background.  The worst kind of interface design, other than one that just doesn't function at all, is one that distracts the player from the game.  It's critical to not ruin the immersion.  One thing that will do that is having an interface design that's not cohesive with the look of the game.  Since I'm not making a generic game, I can't have a generic interface.  Colors, fonts, and general theme all have to match.  

Because you don't usually pay a lot of attention to the interface when playing a game, it wasn't one of the tasks that I thought would be a major time consumer when developing this project, but sometimes small things that we overlook in games actually take a lot of thought and work to get right.  For example, that thing where you hover your mouse over an option and it highlights to let you know it's selectable.  I never really thought about how that works, but it's something I had to learn.  As it turns out, it's not hard to do, but I still had to learn how it works.

As of writing this, I have a mostly working main menu screen and the next challenge is learning how to set up the save/load game system.  I also have to develop the options menu, even though I don't think there will be much for options when the demo releases.  I also have to redesign the in-game message graphics (the one's where dialogue is displayed) to get it to look the way I want.  After that, there's a few small alterations, like music and some minor changes to graphics that need to be finished, but I'm more confident that I can have this demo release ready in the spring.