Poll: Kickstarter for art revamp for AI War? (Tip: Vote no)

[Mick]

I think I come down in the middle of this debate. I think the UI could make things a lot more discoverable and clear, but I don't think that "playable with baby in arm" should be a high priority UI-design requirement.

[madcow]

I can agree with a HUD improvement. And in general a better interface for showing how to use commands.  I've played about 25 hours of AI war, and i still struggle with rememberig hotkeys, etc. Lets take the Starcraft example as a comparison.  The big thing that Starcraft has on its HUD that AI war is missing, is the command pane. A row of clickable buttons that does the same thing as its hot keys.  This would be an amazing addition for AI war to keep people from needing to have a print out of the wiki command list if they want to play. If it were toggleable, advanced players wouldn't have it cluttering up their screen.

Another thing that I know some games do (not sure if Starcraft does it or not) is if we hold down one of they key modifiers, say at the bottom what clicking will do! So say somebody forgets what control or shift (or whatever) does, holding the button could say at the bottom of the screen - click to do X, right-click for Y.  Contuining on that, giving an order in general could say what you just told your units to do.

The controls are kind of such that learning what does what, remembering what they are, and confirming you are doing what you meant are not always easy.  A good command HUD with feedback on commands could help with that in my opinion.

[Kahuna]

lol keep editing your post, eh Kahuna?

Ye lol that's one of my bad habits. I post my posts too early.. after I post I realize something could have been said better or whatever and then I edit. I want to optimize everything.. I'm a perfectionist and I think too much lulz.

I'm not going to edit this onelol <--- that's not actually a dot btw

[x4000]

If you don't mind my asking, what's prompted the start of this thread?

It seems like it's kind of out of the blue.

Well, we have always had requests of this kind, so it's nothing new.  But we're kind of at a bit of a turning point for Arcen, where finally we have about a quarter's worth of financial padding (the only time other than early 2010 and around this time 2012, amazingly).  Unlike in either of the two instances, we're not committed into any half-year marathon projects or similar.  We have a lot of shorter-term prospects from smaller projects, and in general more flexibility than we've ever had before.

Given that, I felt like it was time to pull my head up out of the trenches and look around a bit (although, on reflection, that metaphor doesn't sound like a good idea at all).  Zoom out and see the forest instead of the trees, to use a better cliche.  To a large extent that means doing a lot of feasibility analyses on potential courses of action.  We know what we're going to be doing through September at the earliest already: Nihon no Mura and Bionic Dues.  And really through mid-November unless something surprising happens: AI War Expansion 6 and SC Expansion 2.

But beyond that, there's a lot of potential things we might do.  I have my favorite things in mind for the moment, but since there is an oh-so-slight breather at the moment, I wanted to take a bit of time to fully analyze all the possible opportunities that we might take advantage of.  So I posted about a potential Valley 2 expansion (which I doubt we will do, but we'll see), and this thing (which I really doubt we will do).

It might seem early to start planning for things we might do in December, but actually work on the next projects would probably get started in 30% capacity or so as early as early October.  That's only three months away.  In that time we have to figure out budgets, get designs together enough to be ready to actually start rather than getting caught flatfooted, and most of all choose a project or projects.  We were able to create Skyward Collapse in basically two months because I'd been planning it in a loose sort of a way for more than half a year, and then more of us had been designing it more intently for a couple of months prior to actually starting on the meat of it.

Because Arcen isn't just one person, a big part of my job is making sure that everyone always has something to do and we aren't just sitting around burning through money that we can't afford to burn.  So that means we always have to have advance plans for future things, so that when work on existing stuff runs out, work immediately transitions to something else useful.  So that just leads to a lot of advance planning.  Most of the time this is invisible to the community, because we don't solicit opinions on potential game ideas (that would go really poorly, I'm certain), but in this case there were a couple of opportunities for projects affecting existing games, so I thought I'd bring those up publicly.   Particularly since I wasn't too excited about either and wanted to gauge community interest before just writing them off on my own.

[Tridus]

Ah cool, thanks.

[x4000]

I seriously think some of sort of kickstarter (or whatever way to raise money from fans for new products) idea for a new expansion would be better. I heard you guys were planning another AI war expansion for October. Why not start a kickstarter project after? Let it run for 6-12 months and use the money for the next expansion. The more money you raise, the bigger the expansion gets. I know I'd pay for it.

Honestly I am not inclined to do Kickstarters, ever, except as a last resort or as a source of funding for something that we absolutely cannot afford any other way.  My reasons are several:
1. If people give us "too much money," then suddenly we have to do a bunch of extra stuff that we may not have planned on.
2. Doing all the secondary rewards and whatnot for the different tiers is going to be super time consuming.
3. Kickstarter takes a nontrivial cut.
4. People can't see the actual product that they are investing in, and so the risk of fallout from them investing and then being disappoint is a lot higher than if they just buy something that they could demo first (or at least watch videos and read definitely-correct features lists (as opposed to probably-there features lists).

And for expansions, we just simply don't need the money, either.  It's why we've turned down several publishers, too: they offer money that we don't need enough to warrant the "pound of flesh" that is expected in return.  The same is true of KickStarter, it's essentially a distributor publisher model.

For our expansions, we tend to hit the break-even point financially with them after about a week of them being released, at most.  So there's not really an incentive for us to do anything different until that changes in a big way.  If we ever hit a point where the wider market just isn't interested in more expansions, but a devoted smaller fanbase of a few thousand people are, then potentially kickstarter would be a good way to get them what they want while still not doing it at a loss.  That would be a good example of one of the great uses of Kickstarter.

Make no mistake, I think Kickstarter is a wonderful, wonderful thing.  But one has to know when to use it, rather than jumping right to it.  It's kind of like credit/debt in that way.  Super useful tool, but only if you use it properly.

[zoutzakje]

wow Chris, you certainly know how to explain things well don't think I've ever seen you post something that made no sense to me at all. Guess that's part of the job huh ^^

and well, I was just thinking of a way for me to support Arcen and AI war in particular. I suppose joining in the next Alpha will be my way to contribute.

[x4000]

In terms of a HUD improvement, what I was really talking about was just making the backgrounds of the HUD and buttons more attractive, and maybe tweaking the font.  Visual fluff.  I think what a lot of folks here are talking about is more of a HUD redesign.

It's interesting that there's a debate about if the HUD is good or bad or hard to learn or easy to learn or whatever.  Even in the press, some have praised the HUD as being really good, but then others have said it was bad, etc.  My take on that is:

1. I think that the HUD does an excellent job of getting you all the information you most need, in as condensed a format as it can so that you can actually still see the gameplay view.

2. Particularly on smaller monitors, which we have to support; I think a lot of people with giant resolutions forget this, but on our smallest supported resolutions the HUD is absolutely taking up every inch of space that it can, and probably constitutes... I don't know... 40% of your screen?  Our biggest challenges with the HUD tend to be how to add things such that they actually fit there.

3. The other challenge for the HUD is knowing WHAT information to show.  I think that we've worked that out pretty well.  Sure there are always more things that could be shown, but that's true of anything.  In terms of making the game learnable, having the screen littered with too much information is just as much a problem as having too little information.  And I think that AI War is right on the line of skirting both problems, having a bit of each.  The HUD is undenyably overwhelmingly full of stuff for new players, but at the same time it contains everything that is most needed -- for everyone, new players included -- without having extraneous stuff that you don't need as frequently.

4. Over time we've added various sub-menus and other looks at things to get more data.  Filters and rollups and whatnot.  Control options.  Extra hotkeys for x, y, z.  These things started out largely as nice to haves, but then in the minds of advanced players become "you must have this to play effectively."  And to some extent that's kind of true, but remember the game didn't always have those things and players still played fine.  It's better WITH those things, but a new player in no way HAS to learn all that stuff right from day 1 in order to play the game on difficulty 5 or 6.

5. Like a lot of traditional hardcore strategy games, this one assumes that if you want to be better-than-average proficient with the game, that you'll read the keybindings and look in the menus and so forth.  Tooltips abound, and there's a giant wiki to help with many things, and in general it's a lot more approachable than the old paper manuals from back in the day. 

6. Once you pass a certain threshold of complexity, no interface is "good" in the sense of being immediately accessible.  It just isn't possible.  If you expect to be able to just plunk yourself down in the pilot's seat of a fighter plane or the space shuttle, forget about it!  Those interfaces are "bad" in the sense that they are impenetrable unless you know what the heck is going on there.  If you are learning to be a fighter pilot, though, there's more to it than just learning what all the dials and switches and whatever do: you also have to become a subject matter expert, so you know what "yaw" actually means, and what the ramifications of various G forces are and all sorts of other things.  They have to learn both the interface and the theory behind what the interface is helping them to do.  The same is true in AI War, or any sufficiently complex strategy or simulation game (though these are obviously all way less complex than something like learning to be a fighter pilot).

7. Mainly my point is that with a game of this sort, the interface needs to be expressive without being more cluttered than it has to be.  It has to give you all the summary information that it can without occluding your view.  It has to give you ways to get more information or extra controls when you need them.  And it has to be organized in an internally-consistent way so that once you learn the system, things make sense.


AI War does all of those things, and so I'm inclined to think that the HUD is pretty darn good.  There is more information that we could show, but it would further occlude the view in a way that is probably not worth it for the information in question.  There is not much that we could cut without really hampering both new and veteran players from having the information we need, which is a good sign there is little wasteage.  Each part of the screen is dedicated to specific things, and things consistently show in those parts of the screen, which makes the interface predictable once you learn it.

And so on.  Personally I don't ever see a major revamp of the HUD being needed, as it would just be shuffling things around.  I was just talking about the visuals behind the HUD, since there was more than a bit of grumbling about that from moving from AI War 3.x to 4.0 when those bits of the graphics changed.

[x4000]

wow Chris, you certainly know how to explain things well don't think I've ever seen you post something that made no sense to me at all. Guess that's part of the job huh ^^

and well, I was just thinking of a way for me to support Arcen and AI war in particular. I suppose joining in the next Alpha will be my way to contribute.

Thanks, I really appreciate that.

[Toranth]

Nihon no Muri

I laughed at that typo.  Is that why there have been issues with units not obeying the commandments at launch?  I can just see a bunch of Japanese guys being told to go attack a god: "Muri!"

In terms of a HUD improvement, what I was really talking about was just making the backgrounds of the HUD and buttons more attractive, and maybe tweaking the font.  Visual fluff.  I think what a lot of folks here are talking about is more of a HUD redesign.

It's interesting that there's a debate about if the HUD is good or bad or hard to learn or easy to learn or whatever.  Even in the press, some have praised the HUD as being really good, but then others have said it was bad, etc.  My take on that is:

1. I think that the HUD does an excellent job of getting you all the information you most need, in as condensed a format as it can so that you can actually still see the gameplay view.
<snip>

There are still places where the HUD has minor issues.  For example, the Galaxy map is usually capable of displaying only one piece of info at a time.  Priorities are the only way to mark systems, and they're limited to "P#" and only one Priority per system.  Most alerts and warnings don't show up on the Galaxy map.  Comments can be added, but only viewed when mousing over a system.  Flash is one color, and temporary.  The recent Narrow and Broad search filters have helped a lot, but I think there are still minor improvements that can be made without the need for a major redesign.

That said, it's like the lobby scripts:  Convenient, but not so noticable when missing that it is an issue.

[x4000]

Nihon no Muri

I laughed at that typo.  Is that why there have been issues with units not obeying the commandments at launch?  I can just see a bunch of Japanese guys being told to go attack a god: "Muri!"

Oh lord!  I went back and fixed that, haha.  Typing fast I put more typos than I'd like.

In terms of a HUD improvement, what I was really talking about was just making the backgrounds of the HUD and buttons more attractive, and maybe tweaking the font.  Visual fluff.  I think what a lot of folks here are talking about is more of a HUD redesign.

It's interesting that there's a debate about if the HUD is good or bad or hard to learn or easy to learn or whatever.  Even in the press, some have praised the HUD as being really good, but then others have said it was bad, etc.  My take on that is:

1. I think that the HUD does an excellent job of getting you all the information you most need, in as condensed a format as it can so that you can actually still see the gameplay view.
<snip>

There are still places where the HUD has minor issues.  For example, the Galaxy map is usually capable of displaying only one piece of info at a time.  Priorities are the only way to mark systems, and they're limited to "P#" and only one Priority per system.  Most alerts and warnings don't show up on the Galaxy map.  Comments can be added, but only viewed when mousing over a system.  Flash is one color, and temporary.  The recent Narrow and Broad search filters have helped a lot, but I think there are still minor improvements that can be made without the need for a major redesign.

That said, it's like the lobby scripts:  Convenient, but not so noticable when missing that it is an issue.

The galaxy map is a really tricky case, once again, because of space requirements.  We have to look at what can fit when you are on something like 1024x768 with 200 planets.  As you might imagine, that's super crowded.  In other words, whatever your screen resolution is and if you're playing with far fewer planets, we always have to design to the lowest common denominator.  A lot of HUD "issues" come out of things like that. 

On the one hand, if there is so much information that you literally can't see at all in the worst case, that makes the game literally and truly unplayable in every sense.

On the other hand, if you have to flip between search/filter modes, back and forth, to see things... that's mildly to moderately inconvenient depending on what exactly you're doing.  And to some extent that can be resolved for everyone with the addition of compound filters (show me all planets with a data center, ARS, golem, or... whatever).  But those are really content additions that people have to ask us about, not a fundamental change in the actual form of the interface.  It's like requesting a new hotkey, not introducing the concept of hotkeys.

It's also of course possible that we could do something like make extra features that only work on higher screen resolutions: people ask us for that a lot.  But that gets really specialized and funky, and is often a source of bugs.  Not to mention that if people are relying on things like that on their desktop, then if they play on their laptop they are utterly crippled feeling.  And if your desktop has a smaller display, do you want to feel crippled compared to someone who has a larger monitor?  And if people with larger monitors are advising you to use features that don't work (or don't work right) at your screen resolution, then you're going to be filing bug reports and complaints that we can't actually solve.

See what I mean?  It's super tricky; after four years, we have a pretty good feel for this.

[Nodor]

I understand that the cost/benefit analysis may not make a graphic update a sensible solution.

I am frustrated by the "all kickstarters must come with stretch goals and bonus things for donors" mentality.   The Torment:Tides of Numenara stretch goals were summed up with "and more writing" and if Arcen did an AI War graphics update Kickstarter, I would be very unhappy with any stretch goal that wasn't: "More/better Art".   

Graphics Matter.  A LOT.    I'm playing a lot of Endless Space and Fallen Enchantress over AI War these days because they look better.  They also have reasonably deep gameplay.

So, yes I want better graphics... but I don't know that I make a large enough crowd.  :-)

[Tridus]

I understand that the cost/benefit analysis may not make a graphic update a sensible solution.

I am frustrated by the "all kickstarters must come with stretch goals and bonus things for donors" mentality.   The Torment:Tides of Numenara stretch goals were summed up with "and more writing" and if Arcen did an AI War graphics update Kickstarter, I would be very unhappy with any stretch goal that wasn't: "More/better Art".   

I guess the biggest concern is the increased cost of doing expansions. If we wind up not getting expansions because they're so much more expensive to do that it's not worth it (whereas right now it is), that would be a net loss to the community. It's a risk.

Graphics Matter.  A LOT.    I'm playing a lot of Endless Space and Fallen Enchantress over AI War these days because they look better.  They also have reasonably deep gameplay.

So, yes I want better graphics... but I don't know that I make a large enough crowd.  :-)

Endless Space really is beautiful. I'm super stoked for Disharmony coming out next week, with the added fun of fighters & bombers mixed in.

edit - Probably worth mentioning that this same kind of discussion happens in the Endless Space community, over how fancy the diplomacy screen should be. It's currently not fancy, and some people want more fancy. Others think that would just be a waste of resources and they'd ignore it after seeing it once anyway.

Remind you of anything?

[Aklyon]

I'd forgotten about Endless Space, actually. Anything new/tweaked besides the soon-coming expansion, Tridus? Haven't played it since a moth or two after i came out.

[LaughingThesaurus]

The real problem with a graphical improvement, though, is that you are unlikely to ever really see it with the way this game is set up.
The other 'real problem' is that I actually have a lot of ship icons memorized and I don't want those changing.