Friend List

NOTE: I completed this work the week of October 14 - October 18. But I got behind on my blog posts so I just split up my previous work by weeks.

Like most online games, we want to make our game easy to play with friends. To allow this we have a friend list integrated into the game. Once users are friends they can chat or play matches together. All of this is managed by the social panel in the game.

The social panel, shown above, has your display name at the top. Next is a list of all of the users in your friends list. If the user is online they have a green status icon and when clicked allows the user to invite them to a match, chat with them, or remove them from their friend's list.

The add friend button at the bottom allows users to add new friends by bring up the add friend dialog.

The add friend dialog can handle a variety of problems that can occur when trying to add a friend. Some of these include trying to add yourself as a friend, trying to add a user that doesn't exist, or trying to add an existing friend.

Once a user has added a friend they have to wait that user to respond to their request. This helps reduce online harassment. While the user waits for a response they see the following entry in their friends list.

The user who received the request see a different entry in their friends list that allows the user to either accept the request, decline the request, or report the user.