QCF Design Community

I like the mana/health exchange: it is now closer to the monster health bar for a quick glance at combat prediction. But, now, that totally contradict the current "prettier / less legible" interface.

Please, put some emphasize on the ticks! A better, clearer, graphical display of the required number of rounds, like, say, alternate health bar colors. (It's just a poor starter idea before someone toss a good one). Maybe a number would be nice too.

Actually, I think the contrast is high enough to make the gold/piety/attack/conversion number dials easy to read. And I love the new interface.

The one thing I have is the conversion and monster health bars. Make them look like the characters hp/mana/exp. The conversion bar could be yellow and the monster hp red. If that doesn't look nice, try to make the numbers easier to read.

Yes, I did know that. Believe me, the numbers were SUPER HARD to read.

Yeah the darker 'wheels' for the coin and piety type bars is much better now.

The new interface looks really nice. Maybe it's just that I'm used to the old interface, but the new interface seems too busy.

It's overwhelming at first, but you get used to it.

More testing on the Vamp. Got a feeling Parched run on Avatar, no whupaz involved. Just 55% blood pools and a couple of swells.

The numbers on the bars are a stop-gap. The text rendering change we were trying didn't work out (it's likely that it was the source of some of the long game crashes) so we had to come up with a way to at least display the numbers in a slightly readable way.

We'll optimise for clarity over the next few weeks. Interesting that the closer health bars has been noted, that was the reason for the switch there

Ah, when I went to send this the board warned me there were new posts and sure enough dislekcia mentions that some of this is temporary. Here's my nathed feedback just the same, hope its helpful :]

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Crashiness seems much reduced for me now, great! Again, I loved the original, and I hate to be super negative, but here goes:

I really do not like several things about the new UI. As a few people have said, this is a game where clarity of information is paramount; you're constantly flitting your eyes back and forth over your mana and health and the opponent's and your XP, doing math and planning out possible plans of attack. If you have to work to get this information it disrupts flow and kills that sweet, zenlike concentration. Specific things I don't personally like:
- The busy-ness of the backgrounds makes reading numbers a chore as they compete with random scribble and shine.
- Inconsistency! The monster's attack values are in a different place than the player's, as are the health bars, and they look completely different. I think the designer was going for kind of a mechanical theme for the player and a Monster Manual style info tome for the monsters, but when I play I'm constantly scanning my eyes back and forth from the player area to the monster area and this difference is jarring: I don't want to see the UI, I want to see the numbers, but when I look back and forth my attention is subtly drawn to visual differences between my glances, not numerical ones.
- Inconsistency part 2: by my count we have numbers on: little rolly dials (4 places), on colored bars (3 places), on little dotted boxes (2 places), on scraggly line bars (1 place). It's jarring, it doesn't adhere to any consistent reality and once again it makes scanning a chore when the background, the border padding, the fonts, the text colors, etc are all changing all over the place.
- The monster health bars have nearly-moire dark-light patterns surrounding them that are visually unpleasant. They go, from the outside-in: the dark border of the next-hit-result box, a light line on the outer border, the dark dotted line, the lightness just inside the dark dotted line, the darkness of the shaded in life bar, the lightness of the text glow, the darkness of the test itself. In the span of about 12 pixels you have as many as 7 light-dark transitions when two would be plenty (dark border, light health bar, dark text on it, for example).
- The whole thing is just noisy, filled with information-less pixels. I know you want it to look snazzy, but I gotta information out of there! Its like a 90's website. God, which sounds so harsh and I'm sorry, because it looks like someone worked on this for a long time, but it is just way too packed with details and flourishes and flair. Something more restrained in the same aesthetic could be wonderful, but this is just too much.

Its possible yall have decided you'd like to prioritize the fun-ness of the menus over easy information processing, and that's a defensible decision if so. But if you are focused on ease and pleasantness of use, I think there's some changes left to be made.

Anyway, I sincerely apologize if this sounds snarky or obnoxious or unduly unkind, but I really would love to see this game be as good as it can be, and I'm banking that you'd rather have straightforward feedback than a bunch of pussyfooting around.

My one major new quibble is the exp bars. I'll have a 4 levels above kill, and I think it levels me up. But instead I'm left 1 exp away from that and I lose. It gets really hard to tell. If it had some sort of extra thing to show if you were going to level up off that kill (Like a gold bar instead of a green one, assuming you'll level) then it would be perfect.


There goes matron, no whupaz, feeling parched. I think the Vamp might need another nerf. I got both the avatar and matron runs in 1 try.