Hey guys I was hoping I could ask a few opinions of everyone instead of asking a straight out question. I''m working on an old arcade style game and I was trying to put a relatively simple user interface in there. I.E. -> User gets a power up or dies and there should be a message that appears on the screen for a second or two and the disappears. Also I would like the get the GUI to handle the user''s stats: velocity, life , ect.. (These will always be present on the screen. So I was wondering if it would be worth it to write a class to handle this type of stuff, or would it be overkill and I should just hardcode this type of crap? Anyway I know a few of you out there have written arcade games.. What are your opinions? War doesn't determine who is right, war determines who is left.

Creating a new widget for each stat is probably overkill, but it may not be a bad idea to have a widget for the whole set of stats. Then again it depends on how fancy you want to make the display. For example, if you want to shrink the font if the text for the number value gets too big, a separate widget for each value would probably work pretty well.

Hey wrathnut, i think that it will only be a natural progression to want to add more features to the game as it goes on. My advice is to make the stats reusable, cause you''ll want to add stats to the sequel... and presumably more complicated ones. I initially hard-coded my first stats and re-worked them at least ten times before the game was playable !!
now i just try to write everything with a mind to how i am going to use it in the sequel (hindsight is a wonderful thing)