Hmm, so you'd feel 14 buttons to be too crowding in the current setup. This was my initial hunch. However, I'd say 12 buttons were already too much then. Possible fix: Making the icons a tiny bit smaller, and printing the white numbers slightly thinner, by 1 pixel in width or so per digit.
I was discussing this with Clam in IRC before:
[11:35] <SimonN> the other control buttons in the lower right, they must be somewhere, to keep the interface discoverable. They can't be cut
[11:38] <SimonN> the cramming is a serious downside
[11:39] <SimonN> people already complain when the status bar is overwritten with mouse-over stuff
[11:39] <SimonN> shortening the status bar would lead to overwritage with '3 Platformers (RCF)'So, if 14/15 buttons are the correct solution, but are too cramming, I'd have to enlargen the GUI bar, or add a second GUI bar at the top/left/right.
I'm a little reluctant to make ffwd, zzz, restart, nuke all as tiny as the savestate/loadstate buttons, and then pile them all into the lower right corner. This would gain one panel width over what we have now. It's something to keep in the back of the head.
[12:04] <Clam> so here you have 15 (or more?) distinct "resources" (compared to Starcraft's 3 resources, or Age of Empires's 5)
[12:05] <SimonN> yes, and they are clickable buttons
[12:05] <SimonN> so must be large and nice, everything else is bad
[12:07] <SimonN> I've considered putting the skill buttons along the left/right side
[12:08] <SimonN> then have the entire bottom for the status bar and control GUI buttons, but that bar would require less space than the buttons
[12:08] <SimonN> this makes the screen more tall than wide, not sure how good that is
[12:10] <SimonN> oh my, why is this so hard, I'm sure 14 sorted buttons in a row is the local optimum, without reordering everythingFor comparison, here's the L1 bar shown against the 14-button Lix bar:
Each single button is still wider than what L1 did. Minimap isn't feasible on y-scrolling maps. Of course, what L1 did is bad surprisingly often, compared to modern UI design. So being wider than L1 isn't a saving grace yet.
Materializing my idea from the beginning of this post: Printing the 2-digit numbers with the narrower font alleviates some of the crammy feel. 3-digit numbers need some further fixing, they're too wide now.
-- Simon