Looks interesting and over-ambitious. I really hope you have the long-term determination to see this through I've been following on Twitter curious as to how this will pan out.
A few quick interface points:
- Left-adjust the combat log text. Hard to read at the mo.
- Colour theme the log text so it's easy to see what's going well or bad. "You miss" should be red, "you hit" green etc. Don't use too many colours, and keep consistent. Problem is the log is repetitive at the moment and it's easy to miss important details. I don't care what type of club he's wielding, I only care if he breaks my arm off.
- Group injuries together on the status window, and don't bother saying if something is uninjured.
- Have a little rethink on the display of grass in that second screenshot. At the moment it's messy, and it's hard to pick out the important details. Too much colour is the biggest problem. Stick to a small palette of similar colours, or preferably one constant colour. Also I'd suggest . instead of : for the symbol to make it cleaner.
For future development I would suggest focussing on the combat and in particular getting multi-unit combat fun and interesting. The rest of the game should surround this, as this is the unique point of the game that will hopefully stand out as the fun element. Also, it's probably more fun to code. Jumping and climbing are far less interesting. You won't get anyone to play your game if it's an epic jumping simulator with a side of combat
Thanks for the feedback
. To take your points in order:
- Yes, it's hugely ambitious; I've been going about a year and a bit so far, and I don't anticipate completion even remotely soon, but I'm ok with that.
- I have tried left-adjusting the log, and I find it trickier to read. I might just put in an option for it to be centred/left adjusted the player can change. EDIT: having just tried it again quickly, I'm less opposed. I might make left default after all
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- That screenshot was a tad out of date: the colour-coding is actually very consistent, though that doesn't show it. Red is critically bad, orange is bad, yellow is neutral, light green is good, green is very good, light grey is general, and activities relating to weapons display in the appropriate colour for their status (legendary, famed, whatever). The "you cannot wield that" messages are now yellow (and only showed up so often because I was trying lots of combinations!). Red is only for attacks that do serious damage to you, so they are rare and highly noticeable. Well, rare if you aren't being mauled, anyway
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- The combat log has also been reduced, and in 0.0.2, I intend to chop it down further to two messages per attack. As well as color-coding, they have >> for messages to do with weapons, or [ for armor, and similar other codes. The issue is that there is a lot of information to impart - being blocked, stopped by armor, damage to armor, damage to flesh, bone, etc, and that's tough to cram into a single line, but I think 2 is feasible.
- What do you mean by group? In a large battle, only messages involving you or those (friend or foe) in square adjacent to you will get messages, otherwise there would simply be far too many...
- The grass has been changed a little, but the 'Tundra' ground colours still maintain the most variation. Currently, tundra looks like this:
which I think is acceptable. With that said, a few people have requested a 'simpler' version of the ground, so I may implement that later.
I fully take your point about movement, but combat cannot be fully created until you, and the AI, can exploit the full range of movements. I don't want to fully program AI and then add climbing or swimming and have to go back and add it to every AI. That's the reason I'm focusing on UI and world generation at the moment in order to lay the ground work for the future. As the development plan on my site says, a lot of 0.0.2 goals are other general mechanics that apply to all creatures (like food, encumbrance, etc) since I don't want to produce combat in detail until everything of that sort is in. With that said, you can still fight a few creatures in 0.0.1/2, but those are going to be very few and very basic until all the factors that affect creatures have been programmed!
Your comments have encouraged me to take a new screenshot, which I've stuck above instead of the old two! So, yellow denotes the act of attacking in combat, and then subsequent messages give detail. I do intend to reduce it down to just one or two messages for every attack, regardless of how (un)successful it is, but messages with that kind of 'component' structure are something I'm going to work on for 0.0.2.