New onboarding and UI

This weekend some PubSci friends came over and took a look at the current state of The Founder. There was a lot of really great feedback about improving the onboarding (there wasn't much of one to speak of) and the UI (which was almost entirely in menus, not very "game-like").

So the past couple days I've taken their suggestions and started implementing them. So far I'm really happy with how they're turning out.

The onboarding prior to these changes was really just a screen where you could select your co-founder. And then after that there were a bunch of text boxes introducing all of the game's mechanics and concepts - which there are a lot of.

The onboarding now (below) provides players more flexibility in how they begin the game - they can now select the starting vertical (Information or Hardware) and starting location (Boston/NYC/SF) in addition to their co-founder. So the concepts of vertical and location are more naturally introduced as part of this early game configuration.

For the UI, the general idea was to take it out from these menus and integrate it more directly into the office environment. I went through a few iterations of this today:

Too claustrophobic and disorienting. You lose the sense of the office as a complete space. The perspective limited navigation options on mobile too much.

This is basically the route I ended up taking. It keeps the "god-view" (which is important to the critical aspect of the game) and preserves the player's freedom to pan/zoom around at will. Office objects can be interacted with directly to bring up relevant menus. You can't really see it in this gif, but interact-able objects have pulsing colors.

And this is the most recent build, which is more polished and adds in purchasable expansions to the office. It was important to present these purchasable expansions as noticeable gaps in the space so it feels like your office is "filling up" - i.e. real growth is happening :)