Astro Protocol

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The menu is split by intent. Everything on the left starts or configures a game; everything on the right leaves it, for the store page, Discord, the devlog or a bug report. Keeping those on opposite sides means a mis-click never throws a player out to a browser. Play Tutorial is deliberately the first item, and Weekly Challenge stays visible while locked rather than hidden, so players learn the feature exists before they can use it. The art keeps the lower third to itself so both columns sit in clean space.

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Six factions and a slot for a custom one. The grid on the left is portraits only, so identity reads at a glance and the column stays scannable; everything explanatory lives in the detail panel instead. That panel is ordered the way the decision is actually made — who you are, then where you start and what type of world it is, then the ship you begin with, then the two traits that change how the match plays. Lore sits above mechanics so a player reading for story and a player hunting for traits both get what they came for without switching tabs.

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Four tabs splitting settings by what a player is trying to fix rather than by how the engine groups them. The Game tab carries the ones that matter in a one-hour match: animation speed, text speed, pan speed and tooltip delay all let a player tune the interface's pace to their own reading speed. Every row is label left, control right on one baseline, and there are only two kinds of control — a dropdown for discrete choices, a slider for continuous ones. Defaults are written into the value itself, so what you have changed is visible without hunting for a reset.

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One Explorer at Earth and the rest of the galaxy dark. This is the hardest screen to design, because the HUD has to teach its own shape while there is almost nothing on the map to look at. The selected ship's panel is anchored bottom centre with stats on the left in the same glyph order used everywhere else in the game, and actions on the right as a fixed grid, so a button never moves position between one ship type and another. The toolbar splits to the corners and the primary action holds the same bottom-right seat that End Turn occupies later.

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With 26 ship types, the decision is a comparison, not a read. So each row carries only the three things you actually compare — the ship's art, its name and its cost — and everything else moves into the tooltip. Cost reuses the exact resource glyph from the top bar, which turns "can I afford this" into a colour match instead of a memory test. The tooltip anchors bottom-left, clear of the panel, so it never covers the options you are weighing it against, and holding Shift locks it so a player can follow a linked term like Carrier without it vanishing.

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Structurally identical to the ship panel, on purpose: learn one, you know both. The difference is that each station is prefixed with the glyph of the resource it produces, so the list can be scanned by output rather than by reading names. Costs stay inline even when they span two resources, as on the Research Lab. The tooltip explains the placement rules — inside sensor range, connected to your network — at the moment of the decision, rather than leaving them to a manual nobody opens.

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Because the tech options are rerolled every run, players cannot navigate by memory the way they would in a fixed tree. So the three branches are stacked as labelled bands with their current level in the header: you read where you stand first, and what is on offer second. Each band always shows three slots, which keeps the panel a constant height whatever the roll, and every option carries its cost inline so a branch can be judged without opening anything. The row under the cursor fills, and its full effect resolves in the tooltip anchored bottom-left, clear of the panel it describes.

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Diplomacy screens usually turn into a wall of modifiers. Here each faction is a single row with one track running from war to alliance, so standing is a position you can see rather than a number you have to interpret, and the reward for allying sits at the end of that track as an icon — you know what you are working toward before you commit. The tooltip states the exact remaining gap, "1 of 5 Cosmoencryption techs", instead of a vague instruction to improve relations.

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With over 100 anomalies, these modals carry most of the game's writing. The order is fixed — art, then fiction, then consequences — so a player who wants the story and a player who wants the reward can both go straight to what they came for. Choices are phrased as in-world actions with the hard numbers held in the tooltip, which stops flavour and mechanics competing for the same line. Options the player cannot afford stay visible but dimmed, so they learn what was on the table.

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Nine victory conditions, tracked simultaneously, for every faction in the match. Each condition gets one row carrying a progress bar, the raw numbers and the stars it awards, so "how close am I" and "what is this worth" resolve in a single line. Factions are collapsible, which lets a player put themselves head to head with one rival without the other five in the way, and defeated players collapse to a single label instead of disappearing, so the shape of the match stays readable to the end.