Feedback request: the custom game lobbyHey everyone, thanks for tuning in to the AI War show. This episode: the lobby!
For those of you who don't know me, I'm Eric. Much like Badger, I'm a volunteer helping out with AIW2, but instead of being elbow-deep in the code I have been providing assistance designing the UX/UI.
We need some feedback on the upcoming lobby changes. With all of Badger’s great work on the factions, we really need to get an interface in place to let people dig deep on them. This interface is for the “create custom game” lobby. We have had plans since early this year to create prebuilt scenarios for players to be able to start interesting games without all the fuss, but that is going to be built out after the normal (or “custom”) lobby.
We had some designs in place for the lobby, but the pivot and the enhanced focus on non-player-non-AI factions is putting us back at the drawing board to see if we can’t build something even better. Keep these caveats in mind: this is in no way final, but instead just a way for us to start the conversation with everyone and get your feedback, as well as shraing the path we have walked down and some of the concerns we had with the previous draft.
The new proposal
Reduce, reuse, RECYCLE HUMANITYSo here we are. The concept behind this is to use as many existing elements of the UI as possible, to that both provide thematic unity and to reduce the number of bespoke elements that need to be created. As usual, please forgive the poor quality of these mockups.
In the bottom left corner we have the toolbar that has the settings icon (which has a way of exiting the game back to the main menu as normal), chat icon and timer/speed settings. I’ve coopted it by changing the timer and speed settings into the start button (which would say “ready” if you were not the host, and has a countdown timer before the game starts if there are multiple players) and the load/save preset buttons (we are still planning on having a quick game preset screen, but I am not sure if the design for that is changing at the moment). Then up from there we have the sidebar with the tabs on the left and the content on the right. The tabs would be advanced settings (which would just launch an advanced settings popup instead of changing the tab, in order to make it easier to build in tons of advanced settings), factions tab (pictured here) and maps tab (see next screenshot).
In the factions tab you can boot players or factions (x), see which players are ready (checkmark), add more, change the colors, or go to the advanced settings (the ge-ar box to the right) to get the tabular window popup. RandomTroll doen’t get a color because he’s spectating, but that may change depending on how we implement spectating players.
The map is not literally the territory, figurativelyHere is the map tab with the options for generation we have so far. There aren’t a lot, but I did not want the map options to pop a new window since there is a value to seeing them immediately adjacent to the map.
In the upper-right corner is the instructions for how to navigate the map (collapsible), which is useful for first timers that skipped the tutorial (which happens more than you would think). Since the map creation tab is quite empty, we might just put that into the sidebar and reduce some more, but I think there is at least a little value having it there.
How would you chat in the lobby? The same way you would chat in-game (which has an mockup drafted but I expect to see a few more changes before implementation due to some other UI changes that occurred). Many people would just use a voice solution like Discord or Steam, so no reason to take up a huge amount of space just in the lobby for it.
What do the tabular popups look like? A lot like the the settings screen. Tabs on on side and a table of dropdowns on the other, tooltips as necessary. We are open to feedback on that as it has not been finalized yet, but I wanted to see how people felt about the sparse top level we have here first.
(Another idea I had knocking around was to move the maps tab to a box in the lower-right corner or bottom-center, and then explode the factions tab to a tab for players, a tab for AI and maybe even a tab for every major “other” faction class. But my problem with that is most of the tabs would be relatively empty, especially in single player games with one AI and no other factions.)
How did we reach this point and what were some of the drafts and problems we went through? I’m glad you asked, I included a lengthy retrospective below, but for people who are short on time, let me hit the important questions for the new draft so they can feel free to stop here:
- Is this too minimal (are you having waking nightmares of hunting through advanced options menus to find the one you want to change?)
- How does it feel having that big map there?
- Is it easy to find the “start” button?
- Is it a problem to offload the “back to main menu” button to the settings popup (the same place you’d find it in-game)?
- Are there other tabs you’d like to see?
- How do you feel about that floating set of map instructions in the upper-right?
- If we were to add the top bar back in (in order to better match the way it looks in-game) what would you like to see there?
- Are we walking down the right path or would you like to see something radically different?
- What’s your favorite lobby screen from an RTS or 4x game?
- Do you have a better name for the “other” factions? (AI War runs into the problem that you’d normally call all the non-player factions the AIs, but AI means something special here. You can’t call them the non-humans because there are human other factions. In RPG parlance we’d call them NPCs, but even the AI factions are NPCs.)
AI War Classic
Hello old friend.In the original game, the screen is focused on the map. That was really important since the galactic terrain (choke points, etc) was very important for at-edge-of-skill-level play and also because your bonus ship was based on what planet you selected. The game options were tucked into tabs to the bottom left and player options across the screen on the right.
There were a few advantages to this. One I find is that a large splash of art in the form of the map gives the eye something to focus on and makes the “hundreds of options” less stressful. On the other hand I hate having to crawl through all those tabs to learn what settings I might want to change and work in a tiny box compared to the map which I’m not spending a lot of time interacting with (or I am interacting with it after I’ve made setting changes in my tiny box). If you’ve got some other loves/hates about this setup, please share.
AI War 2 (current)
The new hotness.This version dropped the sidebar, but that’s likely temporary until multiplayer can be integrated. Everything else is similar though, tabbed bar across the bottom, large map up top.
Bonus ship types are not tied to planet selection anymore (even after the pivot), but with your king being your home system again, starting planet choice is important for defensibility. This version inherits a lot of benefits and disadvantages of the previous version.
AI War 2 (initial proposal)
Visions of what could have been.This is the plan for the lobby that was decided on before the pivot. It’s a pretty radical departure from the previous lobbies. I wanted to de-emphasize the map to make more room for settings and bring it more in line with what I see in a lot of 4x and RTS games (many of which don’t even show you a map at all in the lobby). Another big selling point was the diversification of entities on the AI’s side, so a lot of space and emphasis was spent there. The map could still be seen full size in a popup using the “expand map” button across the bottom and a lot of settings were tucked behind “advanced” buttons that would pull up more popups.
Please ignore the red/green kick/ready buttons/indicators up with the players, we would have used a better scheme for color blindness in final.
Zoom and enhance!The advanced buttons called up popups with treed tabs along the left and table setting along the right, as well as a safety that can be turned off to access even more customization options within this screen. The goal was to make everything accessible, but have layers for how deep players want to engage. I have a tendency to suffer from analysis paralysis (I actually play some tabletop games with chess clocks or timers in order to try to break myself out of it) and there is a good chance that if I am thrown with a lot of options up front I will either not start the game at all, or spend all my playtime looking through options and then the moment I start I begin to think if I should have gone back and picked different options. So the idea to help with that, while still leaving a lot of flexibility in the system is:
- Preset scenarios
- Lobby with all the most basic options
- Advanced options with all the relatively fair options
- Safeties off to make the most crazy, unfair setup you can think of
With the changes from the last few months we have to make a few tweaks and this is a chance to go back and revisit parts of the design that we weren’t entirely happy with the first time. The big points are:
- The “other” factions are now a major part of the game anymore thanks to Badger’s hard work.
- The “AI council” is both not flexible enough (who knows if we will end up with as many AI factions as we have “other” factions in this game) and asks for a lot of complexity that may not be present in the early access version of the game. (Plus, what if someday you could play an game of AI war without any AI factions?)
- The map has been de-emphasized so much it is at odds with AIWC and even if this is a re-imagining of the first game, it is still a sequel and needs to adhere to conventions defined by its parent (unless there is a good reason not to).
- Having some of the basic options on this layer is still probably too many options and could lead to analysis paralysis. It may be better to tuck every option possible behind settings windows and let those windows sort by priority.
- By tucking all the options behind windows, and setting those windows up with tabular standardized formats, it would be easier to add crazy amounts of options instead of having to resize and refit elements as they are added.
- Originally the host could set it so that only the host could change the individual players options (beyond things like color and bonus ship) in order to prevent player “cheating”, but having layers of permissions to set up for what should be a friendly cooperative game seems pretty unnecessary.
With those in mind we went back to the drawing board built the draft you saw at the top of the post. Let us know what you think, on the new draft, the old stuff, but in particular the questions I asked earlier (which I’ll reprint here for emphasis and convenience):
- Is this too minimal (are you having waking nightmares of hunting through advanced options menus to find the one you want to change?)
- How does it feel having that big map there?
- Is it easy to find the “start” button?
- Is it a problem to offload the “back to main menu” button to the settings popup (the same place you’d find it in-game)?
- Are there other tabs you’d like to see?
- How do you feel about that floating set of map instructions in the upper-right?
- If we were to add the top bar back in (in order to better match the way it looks in-game) what would you like to see there?
- Are we walking down the right path or would you like to see something radically different?
- What’s your favorite lobby screen from an RTS or 4x game?
- Do you have a better name for the “other” factions? (AI War runs into the problem that you’d normally call all the non-player factions the AIs, but AI means something special here. You can’t call them the non-humans because there are human other factions. In RPG parlance we’d call them NPCs, but even the AI factions are NPCs.)
