UI suggestions

[amitp]

• Use a sans serif font in more places; easier to read, more sci-fi
  
• Use 50% black background under chat area to make it easier to read (and then your chat area doesn't need a border)
  
• Show economy when in town, instead of when zoomed out, because that's when the resource indicators matter
  
• Move gridshards and level to the edges of the screen; center should only be about what I need to know in combat
  
• Consider changing health bar into the same as the shield circles. Simplifies things and as far as I can tell the mechanics are the same. Health bar is equivalent to an innermost shield, right?
  
• Collecting N shards that have to be combined? Make the graphic into something with slots. Think of the Trivial Pursuit circle that had six wedge slots. People naturally want to put wedges into it. No explanation necessary.
  
• That should be your goal with the UI — make it so that people naturally want to do the right things, with no explanation necessary. Read about affordances. The way it looks should suggest to the player what they should do.
  
• Towns have resources and buildings but these aren't connected. Draw the resources on the map to match how much each town has of each, instead of having to read resources. Place the buildings on those resource nodes directly so that the connection is clear. I'll ponder some more ideas for this when I post about maps.
  
• Use a unique shape / color for each resource.
  
• Stretch goal should be to have NO tooltips (especially if you want to use the double click driving mode, or if you want to make this work on Android at some point)
  

[rob]

Amit,

These are terrific suggestions. Thanks!

Rob

[amitp]

More thoughts on the visuals:

• The glowy vector style seems to work pretty well
  
• Tanks look nice.
  
• The animated turrets and firing animation look nice.
  
• The weapons look ok. I've seen lasers and little red/green missiles. Also I've seen some enemies that have an expanding circle. I'm sure there are more effects we could dream up, or feel free to steal stuff from this 2008 experiment
  
• I like that you use something like Jedi vs Sith light saber color schemes — you reserve some colors for players and some for enemies. Green/blue/purple “cool colors” for players and red/orange/purple “warm colors” for enemies. Oops, purple is in there twice. Give it to one side or the other. You can also use grays/whites, especially for inanimate objects like buildings. I'm looking at the RGB triangle in CIE but I'm not seeing an obvious place to draw the line.
  
• The tile art is interesting and varied. The towns look “alive” with the animated lighting. At first the parallax with the stars underneath bothered me but I've now tuned it out. The main thing I'd suggest is for more of the tile art to mean something, but that's over in the map thread.
  
• I love the way things I pick up are animated. It lets me see what corresponds to what, and it reinforces the idea that I'm collecting these things.
  
• The enemy buildings look ok. There's some variety; I think I've seen three different styles. If you ever change the buildings to have shields in some directions, make sure the art matches so that players know they have to hit the buildings from certain directions.
  
• The player buildings look terrible. Some suggestions below.
  
• There are some sparkly things on some of the enemy tanks that I'm guessing are shields of some sort. They look cool but I can't tell what they are.
  
• After I pick up a shard there's a faint version that remains on the ground. Is this a bug or a feature?
  
• In a vector art world, I think procedural animation is your secret weapon. Translate, rotate, alpha, and maybe scale give you some simple effects that can look cool.
  

Thoughts on player buildings:

• There's a lot of variety. That's interesting. But I think it's getting in the way of understanding the function.
  
• Labs and extractors look the same, with differently shaped sockets. I suggest reversing these. Make the buildings have different shapes (one shape for all labs and one for all extractors), and make the sockets the same. Before a building is built, you can draw the outline of it. It'd be even cooler if the socket were integrated into the building design. Total Annihilation did this with their factories — the art included a place for vehicles to drive up onto.
  
• Make each of the labs and each of the resources have a theme. For example you could use a shape for each lab and a color or color pair or color pattern for each resource. (Using colors for this unfortunately gets in the way of colors for jedi vs sith but if there are few enough resources you can do it).
  
• Buildings could use some animation. Random ideas: cranes picking things up, rotating radar and cranes, conveyor belts, energy fields fading in and out, corkscrews, pistons, wheels. I've coded up some examples here.
  
• Labs should use “perpetual motion” types of animations, like wheels or radar, whereas extractors should use “processing” types of animations, like conveyor belts or cranes.
  

Instead of using variety to make the buildings look different, I think you should make the buildings look consistent, and use variety to link them to the town in interesting ways. That way the parts that involve player decisions (which building to invest in) are consistent, and the parts that are purely for visuals (how it's placed in town) are varied. Right now all the buildings are disconnected from town. You can use pipelines, conveyor belts, energy fields, etc., to connect them to the town center, to make it look like all the buildings are serving the town's needs. I posted a sketch of this on the map thread; I'll try making an animated example.

[rob]

• Thanks for the reminder about the weapons you did before. We shall steal these with no regret in our hearts.
  
• We haven't tried to add logic to the color scheme yet. It was never much of an issue in RotMG (or was it?). But yes, perhaps we should try to be more organized.
  
• Should we try disabling the deep background starfield altogether? Or try a different graphic?
  
• Agreed, player buildings are a real problem. We are currently doing a radical simplification, and we'll reapproach using your suggestions.
  
• Sparkly things are an artificial buff (double HP & damage) that we add to enemies that are far away from Origin. The buff keeps redoubling the farther out you get. Increasing the research level increases the radius at which the buff is applied, effectively opening up new territory. I'd like to fix or replace this system. Got any ideas?
  
• The faint leftover lootbag means that it's still there for others to loot. This may not be needed -- once you've gotten your share, you don't care about it anymore. On the other hand, it might look weird to see others extracting loot from invisible bags.
  
• Sockets are currently separate entities from buildings becausewe want to make it possible to interact with the building itself by driving up to it. For example, a teleport pad that you drive onto to teleport to a specific location, or a crafting station that you stand next to to use, or a guildhall that you enter by parking nearby. So we made a separate "socket" for the gridshard-based build/upgrade/repair actions. Perhaps different pars of the building could serve these purposes: one corner is the "please insert gridshards" part, while another is the "use me" part?
  

[amitp]

Minor bug: if you get one-shotted by a super duper ultra strong guy, your health bar goes way over to the negative side before you're teleported back to the origin. ;-)

I think people do get confused about who's a player and who's not in RotMG. They learn quickly so it may not be a problem. Maybe there's some other nice use of color. It's another parameter you can vary procedurally.

The artificial buff is an interesting approach. You're essentially building a soft wall. On one hand a soft wall is nicer than a hard wall in that groups of players might be able to overcome it. On the other hand it might be simpler to make the wall obvious. For example you could re-introduce holes, and then have the labs build bridges over them. I don't know.

I like the idea of multiple sockets in a building, serving different purposes. I didn't know you had something like this in mind

[linkshot]

For color, I'd suggest, as amit mentioned, green/cyan/blue for players, and yellow/red/orange for enemies. Save pink and purple for neutral objects that both factions can pick up/interact with.

As for the RotMG comparison, the only thing that seemed out of place in colour was that the Life Potion looks like it should give Mana, since Mana's theme was shades of blue, but the Mana potion was Gold..very confusing, especially since Life was more coveted (like gold!)

That said, perhaps it should be Orange/Red/Pink for enemies, and Yellow/Purple (composite colours, hooray!) for neutrals. You could even orient it that one colour is bad (Purple) and the other is good (gold!).

EDIT: One nice little touch would be player name scaling with zoom level, so I can still see who is who on my "optimal" level.

EDIT 2: The Homer looks too much like it could be an enemy vehicle. Here is my suggestion:

[zuboki]

A light blue/white glow effect around other player's tanks might make them stand out from the enemies a bit more, but I could see that becoming absolutely terrible once the world gets more populated with players.

I love the idea of animated buildings. The current giant blocks are functional, but homogeneous and bland, and give little indication of their function to new players (other than their tooltips, which could be fleshed out into small statements instead of "Extractor. Building. Level 2. 2300."

Also- could you make player names have a minimum size as you zoom out? I found myself zooming in next to people just to read their tinytext names, which is just a downright bother. Look at Linkshot's name in his Build 19 screenshot, for a good example.