ButtonMaker

If BIABuilder is where the levels come from, ButtonMaker is where everything you click on comes from.

Every button, title, card, panel and badge in For the Common Wealth is laid out here rather than drawn in a paint program. It’s a WPF app, and each piece of art is just XAML: borders, gradients, text, the odd photo. When I’m happy with it, ButtonMaker renders the XAML straight to a PNG and drops it into the game’s interface folder. Change a font or a colour once, re-export, and every button in the game follows.

It has grown to 25 tabs: level tiles, personnel files, the squad command overlay, pause menu, game over screens, subtitles, toasts, the mission map, and lately the Steam capsule art and the Podule logo. Like all good internal tools it is ugly, a bit of a mess, but I’m pretty happy with how it works now.

A couple of things I’ve learnt along the way:

Fonts fail silently. If an embedded font doesn’t load, WPF helpfully draws the text in the wrong font, and the result looks almost right. So any tab that bakes the game’s title now checks the glyphs really come from Cinzel and refuses to export if they don’t.

Everything also runs from the command line. Once I’m happy with the UI, I just up-arrow and hit return to export.