Can you think of a way to improve my game's[1] interface, taking into account that it has to work on both mobile devices and PCs?
Also, if you find any bugs I'd love to hear about it!
Also, if you find any bugs I'd love to hear about it!
As far as game interfaces are concerned, I need to understand the mechanics behind your game and spend more time with it than I'm willing to now. I'll spend time one evening going through it and will give a more thoughtful response over the weekend. :)
- Harest part for me was the learning the hotkeys. Most game designers will layout the slots to mimic the location of the hotkeys on the keyboard. I note that the right-side spells start from hotkey 1 and the bottom quick-items continue where the right side left off. You might find it more intuitive if you laid them all across the bottom and put less space in between the icons. To make it easy to visually determine which hotkey each button is, you could group them in sets for 5. For example: [1][2][3][4][5]__[6][7][8][9][10]
- Consider reducing the size of the buttons for the INV, MAP, and CHAR. These are usually mapped to [I]NV, [M]AP, and [C]HAR as you have them so seasoned players will not have trouble opening them. Hotkeys will be displayed on mouse over anyway for newbies and you'll regain more of your play area.
- With the MAP, INV, and CHAR buttons reduced, you can remove the left bar and leave the portrait of your character as a floating box in the top right, if you like.
- The level of your character can be simply a number in the top corner of the portrait. Players understand this is the level of the character. And you can make this more obvious on level up, this number could GLOW briefly.
- Health is probably the most important stat. I'd probably emphasize it by making it thicker, or longer (or both?).
- Sometimes, I see items disappear (I'm assuming because there are two of them and you just drop them). Maybe you give the player a few points of XP or a gold piece for the trouble. It sucks to find some treasure and it's of no use to you at all. At least you can get a consolation prize. :)
What do you think?
About your last point, that's already the case - you get gold when an item is destroyed, but maybe it could be conveyed better.
While playing, I would move the spell bar to the left, as that seems to be both more natural and more common. For whatever reason, having it on the right distracted me a lot more from the gameplay, I felt as though I always had to keep looking over at it and back (seeing as I hadn't memorized the hotkeys). The info about my current health (which is currently in the top left corner) is displayed under my avatar, which makes it non-essential info, so it can be moved to the right.
Take all of this feedback with a grain of salt, I'm not a UI person :)
About the left vs. right - I didn't think of that. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that my mother tongue is Hebrew (written from right to left)?
It sounds far fetched but I've noticed other such "directional" issues since moving to Europe a few years ago.
I like how lazy it is to move and attack :p At the beginning, I was searching the attack key everywhere only to find out that there's none. Maybe there're could be a way to explain that. I.e. A simple tutorial where you move, get your sword, and attack a frog or whatever ;)
I like the retro look with the modern nifty details. Good job overall!
I was thinking of adding a tutorial mode, need to figure out a way to do it without triggering the tl;dr filter.
I'm planning on soon getting the Deluxe-edition out (which will be free for people who bought the current full version), at which point the current version will become the free demo.
It wasn't immediately clear to me when I was leveling up - I wish there was a little more positive feedback. I also found it slightly annoying that I had to open up the inventory screen to read what the potions/spells/actions in my HUD do. I wish there were tooltips for those items.
Keep up the good work!
- Ask for a confirmation before letting a spellcaster cast a fireball on himself (mistakes).
- When casting an offensive spell, place the target cursor automatically on enemies, allowing for a faster pace. (For keyboard users like me!)
You can play by ssh anytime at joshua@crawl.akrasiac.org (pw: joshua).