Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: eddyvegas

Looking at the beta patches, I see lots of tweaking and fine tuning the game rules, but nothing towards the user experience. Ease of use. Fewer clicks. More intuitive interface. More hotkeys.

I'm going to chuck out a few examples so y'all see what I'm talking about.

When the final decision is made, the Decision tab should disappear automatically. This is one click I don't need to make. 100 turns is 100 clicks. Big tab blocking what I really want to see: the map.

Clicking the same tab you are in, in the Management tab, should close the MGT screen. I have done that intuitively, hundreds of times, expecting it to close the map. It doesn't. It should.

Build Road. Big ugly white screen blocks everything. Gotta move the mouse to the upper left, every time. Lots of ideas here. More buttons in the right click menu. Radial buttons.

New turn should put the pointer in Move Mode.

Need to adjust priorities in a zone? Click Call, adjust, confirm. Why do I need to click call? Shouldn't there be a dedicated button for this admittedly important action? Again, one extra click and mouse movement, getting in the way of playing the game.

I could go on and on. I think of 6 things that could be way better, user experience-wise, in an hour of playing this game.

Let me be clear: I have the best interests of the game at heart. This is not a bitch fest. I have spent the past week doing an interface mod (Graphic Mods forum) for the game, towards the same goal: better user experience. In the words of Woody Allen, I lurve this game, and want it to succeed on Steam when it gets there. But the thing is, you guys are a lot more forgiving of wargame developers over here, and that's understandable. Passionate developer, small budget, niche audience. But this is not a 47th rehash of the Battle of the Bulge. It's science fiction, and Civilization-like. That opens it up to a huge Steam audience, and they are not gonna be as forgiving as y'all.

So yeah, there are tons of UI gripes here already. (For example, the 'Delete all 27 traffic lights' button). Please work on some of them. Thanks for reading.

quote:

ORIGINAL: eddyvegas

Middle mouse hold + drag, as I see in other games, would do the trick.

Come to think of it, is middle mouse used for anything? I don't think so.

quote:

ORIGINAL: eddyvegas

So, hey, now that logistics has been fine tuned, and the game is eminently playable, I guess it's time to work on the UI and the user experience, right? Right?

quote:

ORIGINAL: eddyvegas


Need to adjust priorities in a zone? Click Call, adjust, confirm. Why do I need to click call? Shouldn't there be a dedicated button for this admittedly important action? Again, one extra click and mouse movement, getting in the way of playing the game.

quote:

Middle Mouse today overlaps with the scroll wheel. Giving it a function, locks out the wheel and vice versa.