View Issue Details

IDProjectCategoryLast Update
0021874AI War 2GUIMar 12, 2021 9:20 pm
ReporterAsteroid Assigned ToChris_McElligottPark  
Status resolvedResolutionreopened 
Product Version1.001 Official Game Launch! 
Fixed in VersionBeta 2.757 Super Mega Exciting Sidebar 
Summary0021874: Interface coloring and clarification
DescriptionThis guy makes a lot of good points about inconsistent things in the interface, or things you'd kind of expect from a game:
(Trigger Warning: rude language and dude who doesn't like your game!!! Redacted version pasted below.)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/573410

The first paragraph is about the lack of icons for the tabs themselves.

Copying the relevant part here in case he edits his review:

"the GUI with vertical text for the games most important menus is [sup-optimal] and would be much better with icons instead you could have a planet, a ship, a wrench or crane, a beaker, a terminal or a black hat,a ship with a dollar sign next to it, a book

[...]

back to the UI the tooltips are [sub-optimal] some are coloured correctly others are not many forget tell you about important shortcuts while others will its [sub-optimally organized] not to mention sometimes the tooltips jam and [you] are left unable to show new tooltips for a few seconds while the game [lags]

here are some examples of [¸sub-optimal] GUI:
the Planet Name/view button sits in the top left corner it is a subtle gray that fades into the background hinting which makes you think it is not important the tooltip is all white text and has redundant information about the current Planet's name followed by "Click here to switch to the galaxy map"

now clicking in the top left corner every time you need to switch planets to move some ships is very tedious since your constantly moving the mouse from the center of the screen to the corner which is why the game has shortcuts you can press tab to switch views instead which is much faster but wait the tooltip didn't say you could press tab it should of and the shortcut should be highlight with colours or underlines or bold text or something but its not

the resource tooltips seem to be coloured correctly with resource numbers being green and expense numbers being yellow and some other numbers being red except for the metal tooltip where max metal is white and everything else is gray

the shortcuts for fleet modes are not highlighted in the tooltips which means the tooltips [are sub-optimal] but thankfully the shortcuts are shown in the corner of the icons the player does still know about them

the time tooltip is not coloured and doesn't tell you the shortcuts for speeding up or slowing down time which is understandable because the game has separate buttons for that can you spot them? there too inconspicuous small white turtles and cheetahs on top of small gray arrows they sort of merge together so when your not paying attention they neither look like Cheetahs/Turbles or arrows i would recommend making the arrows bigger and a different colour so they contrast better

[...] why is there a "Coming soon!" button next to the clock [...]
the wave warning tooltip is partially coloured but ship counts and time are still white i want all my numbers to coloured its not good enough thankfully time is clearly displayed in the icon
"
TagsNo tags attached.

Activities

BadgerBadger

Oct 23, 2019 2:21 am

manager   ~0053844

I wonder why the author of this chose such a haphazard capitalization style.

Chris_McElligottPark

Oct 23, 2019 1:38 pm

administrator   ~0053851

I could do with this being distilled down into actual actionable parts.

As far as the vertical text on sidebars goes, that's something that a ton of major products -- including the IDE I coded it in -- do. He's complained about it before, and I added hovertext for the sidebar buttons that let you see the name instantly. I don't think that turning those into icons would make anything clearer.

As for some of the other bits on a skim, the fact that there's a button with coming soon on it surprises me, I guess maybe that was meant for the camera centering thing, I can't remember.

I don't read too closely on these because when the feedback is this caustic in style it can mess up my productivity for the whole day. And it's not like I don't have plenty of other things to be getting on with.

BadgerBadger

Oct 23, 2019 1:44 pm

manager   ~0053854

The button at the bottom left you refer to is the "Chat" button. Which is "Coming Soon", but perhaps in the meantime we might update it to explain that it's the Chat button.

Or it could be repurposed to show the stats or something.

I would just ignore this comment. Most of it is quite unhelpful. It seems intended just to be hurtful.

RocketAssistedPuffin

Oct 23, 2019 1:54 pm

reporter   ~0053857

In my experience when someone speaks like this, they tend to be...aggressive and a bit unreasonable, so I tend to ignore them.

I'd fully understand if you did.

Chris_McElligottPark

Oct 23, 2019 1:57 pm

administrator   ~0053861

Got it, that makes sense on the chat button. Yeah, that's not useful in single player, only multi.

And makes sense on the rest. If the reason this guy can't play the game is because there are some inconsistent colorings in some menus... that's not somebody looking to have a good time.

BadgerBadger

Oct 23, 2019 1:59 pm

manager   ~0053862

I've added some text to that button to say "Chat Button. Coming Soon!"

I think that's the only piece of this that seems like it deserves to be acted on. If this person wants to give constructive feedback then they're welcome to do so.

Asteroid

Oct 23, 2019 3:01 pm

reporter   ~0053868

Guys, you're missing out on useful feedback because you're letting your emotions get the better of you. Who cares if this guy is nice? He's the only one who took the time to write such detailed feedback about the GUI, and I find that most of it is on-point. The game really feels unpolished because of small details like that, and as this reaction exemplifies it can give a bad overall impression, even lead to the belief that the devs don't care about the game and won't support it because they released it half-baked. So you can either blame the world and bury your head in the sand, or fix the game so nobody gets this kind of impression again.

I've been your "third world underage safe-space operator" (South Park, anyone?) for today and edited out all the nastiness or non-GUI-related stuff in the OP. Hopefully it's more actionable now.

Asteroid

Oct 23, 2019 3:13 pm

reporter   ~0053870

Also Chris, I don't that the first comparison that comes to mind on how to design a game GUI is an... IDE? I mean what's next, Microsoft Excel? Unless your target demographic is only programmers who never play games. I do believe icons with small text or with the text in the tooltip might work better, as they're quicker to identify visually and just nicer to look at.

I don't see any sidebars with text-only tabs here, and those are the comparisons we should be making not Adobe Acrobat, Powerpoint and what not:
http://scientificgamer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/es2_galaxy.jpg
https://i.redd.it/aua4cmm43so21.jpg

BadgerBadger

Oct 23, 2019 3:14 pm

manager   ~0053871

I don't understand people's obsession with wanting icons everywhere instead of text.

Asteroid

Oct 23, 2019 3:30 pm

reporter   ~0053873

I suspect you'd play AI War 2 through a command-line interface if that was available Badger ;) . *adds to todo list*

Asteroid

Oct 23, 2019 3:31 pm

reporter   ~0053874

Reopening after cleaning up the nastiness from the copied post text.

BadgerBadger

Oct 23, 2019 3:58 pm

manager   ~0053878

My preferred text editor is Emacs in a terminal window, so yes.

RocketAssistedPuffin

Oct 23, 2019 5:47 pm

reporter   ~0053892

Shrug. I don't mind fixing the issues myself, just not interacting with such people. I've been attacked in the past. I'm autistic and kinda struggle with communication (being able to do Steam forums at all is a miracle, but is stressing in general. Such people really push capacity. Hell the game launch is enough for my OCD to begin getting worse again, and that took years before it got better).

I don't do UI anyway. Just giving my opinion, and there my personal reasons for not being all that into responding to such. Again, fixing is fine, and you may be right in it being useful.

Felt like I needed to say that.

Asteroid

Oct 23, 2019 6:02 pm

reporter   ~0053896

@RocketAssistedPuffin I'm pretty amazed at what you achieve while being autistic, and you're a nice person to be around. So, everything I wrote above can be prefixed and suffixed with "within reason". Please take care of yourself first and foremost.

This said I'm not advocating interacting with people with a bad attitude, there's no need to start chatting to exploit the data provided in this case. I'm just explaining that if one can approach what they wrote with an emotionally detached stance (not saying it's easy, I care about this game too and invested a lot of time in it already), there's sometimes useful data to extract if the person was accurately translating their impressions to text, not just out to insult.

RocketAssistedPuffin

Oct 23, 2019 7:20 pm

reporter   ~0053908

Thanks I suppose.

Apparently a common thing of autism is to be pretty much emotionless, which I am, so I have that stance already.

I already noted the bit you explained I think.

BadgerBadger

Oct 23, 2019 7:22 pm

manager   ~0053909

I've made a number of improvements here

Asteroid

Oct 25, 2019 7:57 pm

reporter   ~0053991

Thank you

RocketAssistedPuffin

Oct 27, 2019 2:33 pm

reporter   ~0054047

Some improvements from me here about colour consistency and the like. Also some additional information added.

Chris_McElligottPark

Mar 12, 2021 9:20 pm

administrator   ~0060758

I think all the actionable parts of this are dealt with, and things like vertical text are standard in many programs and not something I plan to entertain. Thanks!

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
Oct 23, 2019 2:16 am Asteroid New Issue
Oct 23, 2019 2:21 am BadgerBadger Note Added: 0053844
Oct 23, 2019 1:38 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0053851
Oct 23, 2019 1:44 pm BadgerBadger Note Added: 0053854
Oct 23, 2019 1:54 pm RocketAssistedPuffin Note Added: 0053857
Oct 23, 2019 1:57 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0053861
Oct 23, 2019 1:58 pm Chris_McElligottPark Assigned To => Chris_McElligottPark
Oct 23, 2019 1:58 pm Chris_McElligottPark Status new => closed
Oct 23, 2019 1:58 pm Chris_McElligottPark Resolution open => won't fix
Oct 23, 2019 1:59 pm BadgerBadger Note Added: 0053862
Oct 23, 2019 2:55 pm Asteroid Description Updated
Oct 23, 2019 3:01 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053868
Oct 23, 2019 3:13 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053870
Oct 23, 2019 3:14 pm BadgerBadger Note Added: 0053871
Oct 23, 2019 3:16 pm Asteroid Description Updated
Oct 23, 2019 3:30 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053873
Oct 23, 2019 3:31 pm Asteroid Status closed => feedback
Oct 23, 2019 3:31 pm Asteroid Resolution won't fix => reopened
Oct 23, 2019 3:31 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053874
Oct 23, 2019 3:58 pm BadgerBadger Note Added: 0053878
Oct 23, 2019 5:47 pm RocketAssistedPuffin Note Added: 0053892
Oct 23, 2019 6:02 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053896
Oct 23, 2019 6:02 pm Asteroid Status feedback => assigned
Oct 23, 2019 6:13 pm Asteroid Description Updated
Oct 23, 2019 7:20 pm RocketAssistedPuffin Note Added: 0053908
Oct 23, 2019 7:22 pm BadgerBadger Note Added: 0053909
Oct 25, 2019 7:57 pm Asteroid Note Added: 0053991
Oct 27, 2019 2:33 pm RocketAssistedPuffin Note Added: 0054047
Mar 12, 2021 9:20 pm Chris_McElligottPark Status assigned => resolved
Mar 12, 2021 9:20 pm Chris_McElligottPark Fixed in Version => Beta 2.757 Super Mega Exciting Sidebar
Mar 12, 2021 9:20 pm Chris_McElligottPark Note Added: 0060758