This is as much of a rant as a question, for which I apologise.

Basically, I want to make small games that are quite GUI-heavy. Think XCOM, or old-school RPGs. And I want to use higher level languages, such as Python or C#, because life's too short to be writing in C++ if you don't really need to. Unfortunately, what I seem to be finding is that the game libraries and frameworks for any language other that C++ either have no GUI support or what they do have is shockingly bad.

My usual development environment of choice these days is Unity. It has a built-in GUI system, but this is pretty awful to use (unless you're a fan of immediate mode GUIs), lacks a lot of the really useful widgets, is very awkward to style, and renders really slowly.

Unity developers usually therefore resort to 3rd party libraries, but these too are awful in their own different ways. Take NGUI for example: if you want to be able to scroll one panel inside another, it needs to employ a separate shader and you need to place invisible barriers in the interface to stop the player from accidentally clicking one of the objects outside the clipped window. Ridiculous.

Another language I would like to use is Python. But pretty much the only modern game engine there is pyglet (or cocos2d, which is based on pyglet) and that doesn't seem to have any decent GUI library at all. kytten exists, but while having a decent selection of widgets, construction of dialogs is very 'fire-and-forget' and it's incredibly awkward to try and modify the GUI later. You end up needing to create the UI in reverse order so that you can hold references to the controls in the middle, in case you need to edit their values.

Yet when you look at C++, there seems to be a lot of decent GUI libraries available: CEGUI, GWEN, SFGUI, libRocket, Awesomnium, etc. It's obviously not impossible to write decent, usable, flexible GUI libraries. Just that nobody is apparently bothering when it comes to the other languages.

Is it any wonder that so many indie games are simple puzzle platformers, when we have 101 different choices for getting sprites onto the screen, and virtually no good options for getting text and dialogues on screen? Am I missing something? Are there some great options out there that I've overlooked? Or is this as big of a problem as I think it is?

Awesomium will probably be available for Unity again soon I'd bet.. here's the tutorial for one of the more recent versions. They also should have a mono version as well soon.. I think what's up now is a pre-gdc release. I just wish they would keep their old versions available.

http://labs.awesomium.com/unity3d-integration-tutorial-part-1/

Scaleform too expensive? http://gameware.autodesk.com/scaleform/unity

I've never heard anything good about Scaleform from those who've used it. Sure, you get floaty 3D dialogs and animated textures, but making GUIs that are internally complex rather than externally flashy still seems to be a mess.

I'm half-tempted just to go for HTML5 because at least HTML does a decent job of GUIs - but then is a typical HTML GUI compatible with HTML5 gaming libraries? Seems like they render everything onto a canvas so I'm guessing the answer is no.

I've never heard anything good about Scaleform from those who've used it. Sure, you get floaty 3D dialogs and animated textures, but making GUIs that are internally complex rather than externally flashy still seems to be a mess.

Once you know the ins and outs of Flash and ActionScript (which, admittedly, is a huge challenge in and of itself), it's not actually that difficult to get even the most complex of UI scenes implemented. I would say that most of the issues with Scaleform aren't really development-related as much they are workflow-related, and those really begin to show as your UI team size increases. But if you're a single developer who knows Flash and can fork out a few hundred bucks, it might be worth it. But try out the evaluation version first ;)

Yes, I've noticed this too. For Unity basically you have to buy a GUI package from the asset store, and your options are NGUI, EZ GUI, or iGUI. NGUI and EZ GUI are powerful and flexible, but expense, difficult to use for most, and require lots of custom programming. iGUI is the only one that is a WYSIWYG GUI editor and is pretty good, but it is pretty simple and still expensive.

I found I was spending way too much time working on the GUI than my actual game, so I decided to create my own GUI editor system. It's basically a WYSIWYG editor, where you can create your entire game GUI and save it as a prefab. It supports an arbitrary number of hierarchies, 3d animations through the use of a free Tween library, Photoshop like gameobject manipulations like holding shift / control to do different things based on which objects you have selected. Pretty much everything can be changed in the editor scene. I'm hoping to create my entire Game's GUI from the editor alone saved as a prefab, once I get that done I can possibly add content to it and sell it on the asset store.

Take a look to: http://www.noesisengine.com/noesis_gui_features.htm

It has been ported to unity

Once you know the ins and outs of Flash and ActionScript (which, admittedly, is a huge challenge in and of itself), it's not actually that difficult to get even the most complex of UI scenes implemented.

I'm fine with Actionscript but have no real knowledge of Flash itself. All I know about Scaleform is that the devs I know have worked with it said it was awful, and the games I've seen that used it had very simple (but pretty) GUIs, for the most part. I don't know how to find out much more about it though.

iGUI is the only one that is a WYSIWYG GUI editor and is pretty good, but it is pretty simple and still expensive.

To be honest I don't care about WYSIWYG (although I know a lot of developers do, especially those who use Unity). What I care about is:

• Can I construct a complex dialogue dynamically through code? If not, it's worthless, because static dialogues are quite easy to implement without a GUI system just by drawing some sprites and looking to see where the mouse clicks go.
• Can it layout objects for me in lists and grids? If not, it's going to be a nightmare to use for any complex data. I need to be able to push an arbitrary number of objects into a container and have it position them for me - otherwise, I may as well just render them directly myself.
• Can it handle scrolling areas? This is the main thing that stops me writing my own GUI in Unity - since there is no access to scissor rectangles I can't implement scrolling areas myself. NGUI have got around this with custom shaders, which is a fun hack, but they obviously have no clue how to handle input management properly so that's a non-starter.
• Can I change the state of the GUI easily? HTML has this 100% right - if you want to change something, it's one simple function call to find it, then one property access to change it. No need to hook up signals and slots. No need to manually traverse the tree of elements. No need to pre-create the element so that you can hold a reference to it and change it later.
• Can the GUI effectively tell me when things happen? Usually this is done with callbacks attached to events on controls. Some GUIs like to run in immediate mode which makes life much harder since in most languages you only get one return value from a function, meaning each control can only really signal one type of event.

Take a look to: http://www.noesisengine.com/noesis_gui_features.htm

They're going to need to put some actual information on their page rather than just marketing if they want people like me to try it. Life's too short to be signing up to beta programs to find out whether something will be useful or not.

I am left to suspect (partly from experience) that it may be that GUI is one of those things it is difficult to really get "right".

I really don't think this is the case. We have several reasonable GUIs that exist for C++ apps and they look pretty good. We have decades of experience all the way back from Smalltalk through MFC up to Qt and WxWidgets about how GUIs can be written and made effective (to a greater or lesser extent), and a large number of developers now working with HTML/CSS/Javascript to create and use GUIs. In theory the only difference between these GUIs and game GUIs is the rendering aspect, which itself can often be abstracted away, but for some reason few people are attempting to get this right.

That's fine, but with libRocket I have to write the main app in C++, which is what I'd like to avoid.