Roguelike Devlog: Redesigning a Game UI With an AI 2D Game Maker

Sector Scavengers is a spacefaring extraction roguelike where each run feeds a larger civilization-building meta game. This week was all about solving a UI problem that kept getting worse the longer I ignored it: one hub trying to do too much. What I learned quickly is that running both game modes through a single central hub was making both of them worse. Here is how I used Makko to work through it. When One Screen Tries to Do Everything My meta progression systems — crew advancement, station building, hardware research, void powers, and card unlocks — were all living in the same HUD as the controls for individual Expedition runs. On paper it sounded efficient. In practice it created a serious information architecture problem. The deeper I got into it, the clearer the UX failure became. By the time I reached an end-state prototype, the real design question was not "can I fit this in" — it was "what is this screen actually for?" Sector Scavengers is a meta game about building a civiliz