One of the very valuable things that came out of the indie game sneak peek a couple of weeks ago was the ability to watch people interact with the game, and see what they tried to do. Like people typically tried scrolling the map by moving to the edges of the screen, rather than clicking and dragging as is how it currently scrolls. The two that stood out to me most though were: first, that the movement interface seems to work pretty well. As I mentioned before, most everyone who spent a couple of minutes with it was able to grok the way movement worked, and had little trouble getting their ship to go where they wanted it. I think a good tutorial would take care of any confusion. So that’s something that I did right.
The other thing that stood out was how poor the ship equipment screen was. Most people who visited it looked at it for a few seconds, potentially tried clicking a few things, then left confused. The few people who ended up using it could only do so with me walking them through every step of the way. Which is pretty bad. So I spent some time this week fixing that.
Previously equipping a new ship part required you to click the part you wanted, then click the ‘equip’ button so that it was toggled on, then click on the spot where you want to mount it, then click on the ‘equp’ button again to toggle it off. There was also a buy button, it would send the part you had highlighted directly to your inventory, rather than putting it on the ship. That confused everyone. It was a mess, even I thought it was clunky when I used it during testing, but it was really easy to write.
Anyway, I spent some time this week fixing that. It’s all drag-and-drop now. You parts from the store onto your ship to purchase and equip them. You drag parts from your ship to your inventory to store them, or from your ship to the store to sell them. You drag parts from your inventory to your ship to equip them. It’s all so much easier, and honestly it ended up being a lot easier to code than I was fearing.
Anyway, it’s obvious when you think about it, but it’s still easy to forget just how opaque your interface can be to someone who doesn’t spend dozens of hours working with it. Oh, I also added missiles, they are pretty cool looking. I’ll put together a video at some point showing them off. Someday. Probably.