Hellchick

The days of the PC-only game developer are about as alive as the days of the dinosaurs -- if you're a PC-only game developer these days, the chances are good that you're making casual games, not full-on triple-A shooter or RPG titles. Even RTS games, the genre with devotees that cling doggedly to the "PC is the only viable platform for RTS!" mantra, have transformed with the recent release of Halo Wars by Ensemble.

And that brings us to today's Good UI Principle:

Principle 1: It is far easier and cheaper to develop a multi-platform UI for the console version first and use it as the basis for the PC version than it is to develop the UI for the PC version and back-develop it for the console version.

Principle 2: In the era of multi-platform (and thus multi-input-device) games, UI coding language and algorithms need to be changed from language that uses words like "mouseover" and "rollouts" to "on-actions", "on-exits", and "on-selects."