it’s my first post here and I hope I have not missed a thread for UI-Feedback. But after playing a while (with the branched build, I couldn’t play last week) I have a few bits of feedback to the UI, that I wanted to bundle up a bit.
General UI
Placement of Combat-relevant UI-Elements: In combat I am most interested in heat and hull, but I have to look from one to the other and back while fighting. I would prefer it, if both informations would be in the same area of the screen (same for the weapon-cooldowns, when they are added).
The Heat-Bar is a welcome addition, but I think it could be a bit bigger. Also, I would suggest adding in a small Piece of Art (a thicker line, a small whistle or something) at the 60%-marker. I now from reading here that 60% is the threshhold for risking damage through heat, but the UI communicates that in no way (in fact, before reading here I assumed I had hit 100% for a short period of time, when one of my weapons malfunctioned instead of seeing it as a percentage-chance when heat is over 60%).
I would (in addition to indicators for weapon-readiness) suggest a similar indicator for the amount of "straving"-steam available. It is by far the most impactful movement-type in combat right now (with most projectiles flying in a straight line and the ships facing each other with their fronts to fire).
I like the new information design in the top-right. But I think the color blue for Fuel doesn’t match the fantasy of the storylets well. When we talk about fuel, it’s about heat, coal and burning. So orange may be a better color.
Lastly, I am missing a clear indication of time like given in sunless ea (the bells and lamp-symbol). It doesn’t have to be a chatlog-style logbook like Sunless Sea (in fact I really like the text being written on the overworld) but an indicator of the date/a calender with a small indication if I currently own the date-property would be much appreciated.
UI in open Windows
The Journal is for the moment in chronological order. this is fine in the beginning, but it gets tedious when it is full, because you always have to scroll down to check your most actual quests. I would strongly recommend changing the order to be anti-chronological, with the newest element first.
It is at the moment not possible to see how much Favour I own from redeeming port reports (except when I have just redeemed some). It would be pretty nice to be able to check the amount of Favour I currently have in the peculiarities tab like I can with most other qualities. (Or even make it a posession?) Also, it may be nice to know how much Favour each transaction in New Winchester will cost me before doing it.
Shops:
When buying equipment it would be a very welcome if it would display which type slot it will fit into.
For the moment buying/selling higher quantities via the arrows is not really better than clicking the Sell/buy-button X times, as I still have to click the arrow for each additional element. I would like the ability to just click the quantity-number and type in the desired quantity via the keyboard.
I hope this helps a bit. I will probably do some write-ups for the different focused-Feedback-Threads next and then write another longer focused Feedback on some ports and storylets.
You’ve not missed one of our sticky threads for UI, we’ve not done one on this topic yet so your thoughts on this are very welcome. [/color]
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[color=#6666ff]You’re not the first to mention this and it’s already in our feedback spreadsheet. I’ve added your voice to this particular point. [/color] edited by FailbetterFuzz on 1/24/2018
I would like to second pretty much all of these except perhaps for the fuel color; blue is pretty and the hottest flames burn blue anyway, so I’m fine ith it.
However there’s another thing I’d like to add: combat UI needs some work. Currently there’s no way to gauge relative hitpoints for enemies in the Reach, nor do we have any indication of what exactly those enemies are called. Certainly I can see that being a choice made to add to the atmosphere of mystery, but frankly it’s not one I like. If we’re being asked to hunt Chorister Bees, shouldn’t someone in the locomotive be able to identify a swarm and its relative strength? In SSea I used the pop-up names and HP bars to gauge whether or not it was worth getting into a fight with something, and not knowing that kind of thing honestly makes me warier of combat than I want to be.
I could also see some interesting things being done with name/HP labels if the team was so inclined – for example, substituting "???" for a rarer enemy’s name until it was defeated, thus preserving the initial "what the hell is THAT?" reaction I remember you saying you wanted.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love this game and will play it regardless! But it’s odd to be asked to hunt something that clearly everyone in the game knows by sight and, as a player, have to guess whether or not you’re shooting at the correct thing.
That’s a very good point about labels for other shipping/monsters. I didn’t even realise that those badly-piloted yellowish ships that are always bashing into things were the Tacketies until I read the post here about the Guests that travel around in a Tackety ship. I thought that they were simply neutral shipping and left them alone, assuming the Tacketies hadn’t actually been put in the game yet. :)
(Being the sort of person that doesn’t really do early access because I fear it will spoil my enjoyment of playing the finished game, I have only played a couple of times, hence my lack of familiarity with the various things I’ve met. But I just popped into the game for a bit of a look yesterday out of curiosity and ended up playing all day! Loving it so far, but can’t wait until I can venture further afield. Not really relevant to this thread, but I just wanted to say how impressed I was when I found the grave of the Silent Saint. It was awe-inspiring. Very beautiful, in a weird, ugly sort of way. Can’t wait to find more visually impressive things like that.)