I think the bed isn't the most obvious icon choice for that behavior.
Agreed, fully. I'm going to log a task to go through the existing icons and assess their suitability for what they do. When we were testing a couple years ago, it came up repeatedly that players needed a button to warp back to their colony after doing something far away. The budget was pretty thoroughly exhausted at that point and I was cutting new releases on a pretty quick cadence, so I just went through the list of existing overhead sprites for items, picked one of the bed types, and went with it.
More thought should've gone into some of those icon images, but it's something I just forgot about. When you're really used to staring at them for hours on end, you get used to it, but it really has to be optimized for new players.
How about a system like DF does for setting bookmarked locations to warp the camera to? So you can have multiple such locations, and not get stuck with just one.
This is a fantastic call, too. I use Mantis as my tracker for feature requests and open defects, and I've got a request from 2017 to add "SWG-style waypoints". You basically pick out an X, Y, and Z location, plus a preferred view type, and map that to a number. Then, you can map that waypoint to a function key to get there pretty quickly.
Have you used Discord at all to do screen sharing and just watch playtesters play? See exactly how a stranger interacts with the interface?
This is another fantastic suggestion. It's funny, I've fallen a little behind on some of the current meta-tools / technologies in gaming, and Discord is something I really haven't gotten into. I know it's far from new, but I've got to check it out. When it gets time to do testing again, maybe I should ask here for volunteers to do precisely what you describe.
Text chat is also an option. But what if you just throw them in the deep end and take notes on how they play.
Absolutely, this is exactly, 100% what I'd want to do. I'd just need to find some volunteers!
I'd also suggest having an easy way to zoom in on a particular colonist if you don't already.
This functionality we do have, and it's a great idea. It's one of the first things I found myself craving as I'd be playing solo. I basically set this up the way that the old Command and Conquer games do it with units, where you can map a colonist or a fire team to a number (0-9) and press that number to warp to them. I think it works pretty decently for expressing directives during combat.
Some excellent suggestions on what the homing-icon should be, too. I'll give it some thought, see if I can post some ideas, and gather feedback. A bit of experimentation should get us to the right place.
Disclaimer: It was years ago that I had played the beta.
It's a little grim when I think about how long it's been, and I certainly can't expect a lot of really specific recollections about the experience. The UX has changed so much between then and now that it'll play rather differently, anyway. I'm super glad and grateful that people can remember anything about the old beta at all, to be honest.
The biggest problem was with the views: You had to have the right combination of views in order to find stuff, or it disappeared. So Isometric should fix all that.
I personally think the isometric perspective makes the world space so much more palatable and easy to understand. It doesn't need a ten minute tutorial video anymore to explain how you're looking at a 3D world that's being rendered in a 2D format. Now it should just...work. For the most part. That's the hope, at least.
The timeline is one of the tougher things to really talk about on this project. The overarching issue back in 2016 / 2017 was that the game just wasn't right yet, and there were fundamental, deep seated issues that weren't going to be overcome with a patch or a tweak. The totality of the rendering scheme was a big part of the problem, so it had to be scrapped and redone. An isometric renderer that has to solve some of the problems of a truly 3-space environment is a great deal more complicated than the old, overhead system.
But I'm just not going to release something for wider consumption until it's right. We'll get there! It takes some time, but eventually, we'll get there. Keep making incremental improvements until the experience is what it's supposed to be.
As a final note, I super appreciate your description of what got you into the project. That's
exactly what OC is all about, the
exact experience the game is meant to deliver. And I really can't thank you enough for keeping an eye on the project for all these years and helping me work toward that.
Also, for those who say "but you could figure it out in DF!", there are two responses:
I'm with you on this, too. It's not about remaking DF or trying to replicate the DF user experience. Sometimes it's a useful frame of reference, because most people who have tested OC have played DF, so it's sometimes easy to point to things that DF does better. But OC has to be fun in its own right, and it has to deliver the right kind of experience - that's what ultimately counts.
**Edit**
A map with a big X marks the spot
That's actually a great idea, too. Some marker on the minimap and world map to show you where you've got structures and colonists would be a huge help.
**Second Edit**
Anytime I see you guys post in this thread, especially with all this thought-out commentary, it gets me really pumped for the next release. I'll see what I can do about posting a procedural sprite demo in the next week or two.
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Topic: Outer Colony (Read 70745 times)