Quote:Original post by Doolwind

What do you currently use for mocking up your GUI designs?

Pen and paper combined with some basic shapes (boxes etc) printed out in GIMP. Although I use such cutouts more for website designs. For games, mostly pen and paper as it's easier to create new and unique elements.

Quote:Original post by Doolwind

If there was a tool created specifically for mocking up game GUI's, would you be interested in using it?

No interest here, but tools are important, so I think you should write it regardless if you have such an interest. At worst, you will find it useful yourself. At best, someone else will also find use from it.

Quote:Original post by Doolwind
What core features would you like to see to help you mock up your GUI's?

- Resizable 9-part panels, each part corresponding to an image, to show how artwork will fit.
- 'Projects', which aggregate multiple dialogs. Subprojects would be handy too.
- The ability to set some project-wide settings (eg. font name + size), and to be able to change them in one place and have that propagate across all dialogs in the project.
- Human-readable export formats that write out all the details associated with the mock-up so that they can be recreated by artists and designers. Project-wide standard settings would be notated as such.
- Preview mode that superimposes the current dialog over a project-specific background (eg. a mockup of the game, or concept art). This should support several common screen resolutions and be extensible to any arbitrary resolutions the developer might want. Allow full-screen mode where possible.
- Statistic gathering, showing how many different images and fonts are in use, and how much memory and disk space they consume.
- Dialog 'shuffling'. With several dialogs on-screen at once, click a button and the system randomly places them all with no overlaps (if possible). This could help the creative process.
- Invisible vertical and horizontal boxes, and grids, to automatically line up elements within a dialog, so you can drag and drop a widget into the desired slot and exact positioning and alignment is done for you.

Some of these are bordering on being fully-fledged GUI editor features - but I think that if you're trying to add value over just pen and paper or even just some Photoshop work then you may as well make it practical to see the end GUI almost exactly as it will be in the final product, and to produce output that helps you get to that point.