So for the basic coloured buttons, I set up a dependency property that set the colour and then used triggers to adjust the colours and decor accordingly. With the competition buttons, I used individual resource dictionaries instead, but for the basic colours it felt a bit like overkill. It would have been fine, but it was pretty fun to dip my toes in the water of some more interesting custom dependency properties.

These buttons also led to me developing the Tile Row Control, which has been brought across to many of our other games. It's a ListBox that grabs how many items there are, how wide they are, which item the user has selected and calculates how far to move the list based on this information. This gives us a whole lot more freedom with animation than the stock-standard WPF ScrollViewer, which doesn't really play nice with animation, especially when controllers are involved.

Since it's a custom control, I had to write a whole lot of C++. I'm not going to pretend I'm fluent - pointers are confusing and the syntax is such a pain for someone who doesn't come from a programming background, but I got by with a little help from my friends. And I was gonna try, with a little help from my friends... Thanks, Big Ant UI Programming Team! <3

Writing animations in xaml was already an adventure, but I can promise that writing animations in C++ is significantly worse and I'll never complain about xaml again. However... Nothing compares to the joy I felt after getting this to work, and realising that maybe custom controls aren't that scary. A whole new world opened up to me after this, and it was such a win for my confidence!