[quote] Would that correct this problem?
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Nice idea. You’ll have to wait until some new user comes along to find out if it works :).
You have to keep in mind that these funny and counter-intuitive intefaces are only this way because the game is going to be a direct port to phones.
The large icons, large text, etc. is all that way since phones have a small screen and the PC version is simply a ported up version of that with larger graphics and more resolutions.
Generally, because of the phone version, people will be playing game at the lowest resolution possible with low resolution graphics and only using the keyboard to navigate the menus. Any changes to the GUI need to be functional there as well.
That’s why we’re not using using a GUI more or less identical to windows but with our own skin on it.
Now, some of the suggestions here are good, such as the highlighted and selected items appearing different. Multiple colors would make things look bad, but having the highlighted items at 75% brightness and the selected one at 100%
Similarly, instead of the scrollbar being an outline of a square we’re looking into making that solid.
The horizontal line connecting main menu items is an idea we’re looking into.
On the issue of icons, yes a lot of them are being used for non-standard purposes in the main menu. Using a standard load/save icon with say a disk wouldn’t work well since this is going to be a cross platform game. On average the arrows have worked and this is the first comment I’ve received on that.
Anyway, thanks for the comments. This game has been more of a nightmarish balancing act with the limits of handhelds then I initially imagined when it came to the GUI.
[quote]You have to keep in mind that these funny and counter-intuitive intefaces are only this way because the game is going to be a direct port to phones.
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Fascinating. I’d have been more interested in playing the game in the first place if you’d said this ;D.
On a very sharp large screen it is not easy to distinguish between highlighted and selected. I can only imagine it would be even harder on a small device? Furthermore, it is a flagrant departure from standard GUI semantics.
So…why, exactly, would multiple colours be “bad” and a tiny change in brightness be good? Especially considering humans perception of differences in brightness is very poor, and perception of differences in colour is excellent?
Hey, it’s your game, you do what you want. I’m just interested…
PS FYI when I talk about “standard” GUI’s I don’t mean the use of things like a windows grey square button on a grey background, but instead the conceptual and semantic aspects. For instance, the concept of a button labelled “cancel” on every dialog or sub-menu. Or a button at the top right of the dialog or screen with an “X” on it which quits or closes the current dialogue (concept, not dialog-box) - which could be the application if no other dialogue is going on.
Well, fortunately with the low resolution version we’ll be able to test whether or not a difference in brightness will work or not. The main reason I’m reluctant to use a lot of colors is to keep the interface from looking like a christmas tree. However, using a different color of blue could work well.
I experimented with using orange as a color in the GUI to add some contrast, but it was too overwhelming.
On the comment of standard v.s. non-standard GUIs. Almost all commercial PC games use non-standard GUIs. This interface is more or less based around the sort of GUIs seen in other games of this type (Escape Velocity, Solar Winds, etc.), but converted to a format intended to work on phones.
Having cancel and minimize dialogue boxes at the top of the screen would imply that you’re closing down that window, not the whole game. …and since the main menu is using a different setup for the exit, that is carried on into the game menus for consistentcy.
Anyway, discussions/arguements on design philosiphy can get quite messy. I hope that what we’re aiming for is understood and a lot of the comments here have been good at cleaning up the interface. (quite a few people to add to the ever-growing special thanks list 
)
Suggestions on better icons would be appreciated, something that works cross-platform and is easy to see at a smaller size. We’d like to try to avoid mixups on the meanings of the various icons.
Since I’m the problem child I can give more feedback on why I thought what I did.
blah3 read my mind, (cool trick too) about seeing two rows of buttons. The single highlight across both would be better. Even better than that would be 1 ‘visual’ button. Just make the box enclose both and be done with it. If resolution is an issue for a phone then when it gets reduced from the ‘biggie’ size down, it would probably run the two together any way.
I am very curious, if this is supposed to be for phones, then why aren’t you testing it on them? You may be and we just don’t know it. My first thought is that there is no way I’d play this on a phone. Why? Well, its way too involved for me to want to play on a phone. Now this is a VERY personal opinion of course. I would prefer to play games that help pass the time in airports, car rides, etc. This seems ‘too involved’ for my portable game needs.
I would think the menus would be MUCH easier to use if there was an option highlighted and you scrolled and selected it. To exit or go back from a menu, my first ‘phone’ instinct would be to press the ‘back’ or end key.
As far as the selling things go, I’m going to have to ‘stand my ground’. A phone or PDA isn’t going to be known for its excellent contrast in daytime viewing. Making something be recognized by a contrast change doesn’t seem like it will work. If you had a way of altering the item to be checkered when selected, it would be much easier to tell what was going on with it.
There is also a difference between business rules and gui rules, if you will. My comment on just selecting something once to sell it at a planet, makes more business rule sense to me. If I am trying to sell stuff, then let me quickly sell it. Think of games where you go into a shop and want to sell 50 arrows. You usually get to sell them by entering an amount and then saying yes to a confirmation question or you keep selecting the sell action with no confirmation over and over. The click twice method you have implies the confirmation without asking the question explicitly. Either way its 2 button clicks for a user, so why not do it the ‘standard’ way. You don’t have to lose the ability to buy stuff back with no penalty, just because you might use the second method of a 1 click sell. As a user, I’ll see the planet inventory go up each time I sell something, so I know I can get it back.
I need to play the game proper to come up with more input. I’ll see what I can do this week,
Glad you are open to feedback, even if its not roses.
HTH,
Dr. A>
Here’s my take on the menu icons -
Play - Planet seems logical or maybe a ship
Load/Save - up down arrow makes no intuitive sense. A disk does though
Options - Checkmark seems pretty right on
Credits - I thought it was a document thing, such as instructions or an overview page of the controls. If the icon looked slanted with the top smaller, it would like Star Wars movie credits, which I would relate to.
Exit - The arrow makes sense now, but at first glance it looks like a next page option.
Since a majority of languages read left to right, you could put the text on the left and the icon on the right. The concept is description then action. If the text was right justified, you probably keep your two boxes idea, though I’d dispense with a box around the text at all at that point.
Cheers,
Dr. A>
what is the “standard way” of doing the buy/sell? I’d think a double-click to move the object to the first intuitive location is a good thing.
If you’re implying that you should be able to select all that you want to sell, and then hit one “Sell” button, I think that would be harder. That’s like, double-click vs. click, scroll left a couple, scroll down a few, click sell, scroll back up to get to the other items.
EDIT:
As for the comment about icons on the right of text, that’s awfully hard to balance. If you’re using Windows, look ALL around you. Everywhere there is an icon coupled with text, the icon is on the left, and the text is on the right. I think that’s pretty standard for other operating systems as well.
Ahh, and here’s how the scrollbars and menu items are looking now:
http://www.gamelizard.com/images/games/rimscape/menuItems.gif
http://www.gamelizard.com/images/games/rimscape/menuItems2.gif
In the first version of the design document a setup for moving all of your items over and then hitting a transaction button that would then execute the changes was mentioned. When working on the actual game, it proved to be a little more than troublesome to impliment.
Since players aren’t handling massive amounts of cargo (such as 15-40 items at once) the current system should work fine. However, if it does pose a problem we’ll try to see if there’s any way it can be slimmed.
Dranonymous: The problem with using a floppy disk or CD in the icon is that this is a cross platform game. Some people with phones in all seriousness might have no idea what a floppydisk is. Having multiple icons for each platform would also be a mess and take up more space. That’s the reason the arrows are being used. If there was some sort of universal ‘storage’ symbol, like there is the power symbol on electronics, life would be much easier
I’ll look into slanting the credits icon though, to give the impression of rolling credits.
Right now we haven’t converted the game to MIDP2.0 as we want to resolve most of the issues before porting. Otherwise we’d have to constantly update two very different versions.
We do have someone porting other GameLizard games in order to get practice with working on games with similar structures.
As for the storage icon, why not use a CD? I think that would be the most recognizable for storage of anything. If people use a computer, they know what a CD is or have a CD-Rom. Maybe we could also user something like an image of a pen writing as if to say, “write your game to disk.”
As for trading, you’re most often only trading 1-3 items. Standard transport ships can carry at most 10 items, some of which the player would probably want to devote to ship-enhancing special items, you won’t expect excessive trade of massive numbers.
If you want to see what Rimscape MIGHT look like when it’s ported, load up the game and scroll the resolution as low as it’ll go and play it.
I’d be interested to know how you intend on approaching the free-rotation issue on phones.
Even with midp2 or the nokia api, free 360 rotation is still going to be dog slow.
We’re already bumping into that issue in converting over some of the other Gamelizard games.
With the MIDP2.0 version of Robo rotations run at a high speed but with visual artifacts.