Improving the Lobby Area

It's clear that the lobby area in the Multiplayer Screen needs to be remade as it's not only a placeholder, but also very poorly designed in general. I decided to try a few different ideas out and see how they faired with the bottom left placement. The first of which was just using icons with context menus for more information. However after trying this, I didn't make the context menu because I knew the design wouldn't work. Just using icons doesn't work well, especially with players of this kind of game, who all too often to completely random icons and change them often, making it really difficult to choose who you want to.

Another thing I considered for this was to have the border colour change depending on the status of the player's friends (like green for in-game, blue for online and grey for offline, etc.). I chose not to do this because there isn't much point in adding it if I don't like the design in general anyway, so I went to my other idea.

This version functions more like CS:GO's and Valorant's friend and lobby lists, displaying the profile picture, name and their status. I also quickly included a context menu for them just to show what it would look like. There is no easy way of me changing the options here, as I hadn't made this menu with modularity in mind because I thought I was only going to use it for the inventory items, which is bad planning. I will need to improve this planning mindset going further to prevent these kinds of problems from occurring as they aren't a great showcase of my skill.

After thinking about it, I decided to make a new context menu widget for the lobby buttons. It's too late to make the already made context menu widget modular, so I instead duplicated it and just changed the settings to fit the lobby options. I also used a similar method of changing the text in the context menu as I did with the equipping buttons in the inventory context menus. This makes it easy to change something like "Invite to lobby" to "Kick from lobby" with a boolean.