Desktop GUI for designers

We plan to develop an app for everything, including AI Module, Unity frontend, python gameplay, card/deck editing, data visualization, etc.

Motivations

Accessible to designers

After half, we start to think about how to help designers. We need a user friendly GUI to let designers use all the tools we provide.

Organize our tools chain

We have many tools in different platforms using different techniques. When we try to build more and more tools, it is a chance to organize our tool chain.

Schemes

We have sevarl choices to develop our desktop GUI

Unity Built-in UI System

Pros

Our game GUI is developed in Unity, and we are familiar with Unity!

Cons

Unity’s UI system is not designed for generalized desktop GUI. This would be a big problem when we try to build complex UI such as data visualization.

Browser + HTML + CSS + JS

Pros

Easy to use, only need a browser. Easy to develop, web techniques are convenient and have many libraries and frameworks.

Cons

Browsers usually don’t support manipulating local files and start other .exe in another process, which are important to us.

Electron(final choice)

We finnal chose electron for several reasons: - Use web standards:
Developing a desktop app is basically the same as writing a website in electron. It uses html, javascript and css, and we are already familiar with these techniques. - Highlevel, lightweight:
Because of html and javascript, developing an app is much easier than other techniques such as windows naive API, Qt, etc.