documentation for HUD

[huminado]

Upon downloading the game, and playing for the very first time, what happens? The next 60 seconds are the most important for a game, because the opportunity is highest to either hook them in to playing, or to turn them completely off.

My experience was, that I saw a ship, and when I hovered my mouse it said launch. I saw nothing else in the display (even though the intent was that I _should_ move my mouse to somewhere else in the room and go wander off down hallways.

[Lesson: If you want me to wander hallways to begin with upon entering the game, don't make the launch-pad the starting screen. Make it the bar.]

But I launched instead of wandering. Then I saw some text in the upper right-hand corner that disappeared faster than I could read it, and I couldn't quite make out everything it said. This gave me a confused feeling.

[Lesson: You need a chat history window that is scrollable.]

Okay so at least I'm flying. Eventually I had to read the player's guide (ugh! reading a PDF... what if I don't know English? well fine then I don't play). The readers guide showed me how to display the docks (because displaying the docks BY DEFAULT would be too difficult wouldn't it? and changing the shape of the dock to have an embedded text that says "hit D to DOCK" would be too difficult too?

Eventually I'm curious what the LJSE means. I look at the HUD section of the player's guide. I look at the WIKI. Nothing.

But wait - before you say "Oh we'll just add 4 sentences that explain it!" - before you say that - it's the the wrong answer. The correct answer is "how do I - the game developer - project into the player to see the game the way they see it?" And if you did that, the odds of a player hitting the Launch key within the first 10 seconds of game start, and seeing a HUD display they can't make sense of would be very high. So the HUD should be addressed early in the manuals - or even as a paused SPLASH screen that forces the player to see what is important (i.e. one the user MUST hit ESC or ENTER to get past - it DOESN'T time out).

A screenshot of the HUD should have every single (EVERY SINGLE) element labelled and explained in the accompanying text.

Does the manual need 20 pages explaining how to navigate around hallways? Are you an idiot? No - because a lot of work has gone into this. But unless you can project into what a player is going to do, you'll be explaining the self-explanatory, and neglecting the subtle. And that leads to confusion and dismissal.

[EatMyDst]

It does seem confusing at first, but trust me it gets better once you know what you're doing. I still don't even slightly understand combat. But the text that disappeared is most likely the automated thing telling you that you've left the planet, its nothing important.

[huminado]

How to NOT SUCK:

You already have a city-navigation interface (screen to screen via links).

Create tutorial screens that MUST be navigated to get to the "starter city". This city looks identical to the aqua planet city - but it has extra tutorial links. Explain how to get around cities. Upon clicking launch more tutorial links screens for how the HUD works and how to dock/fly/ etc.

Upon leaving these tutorial links (that has a city embedded in them) the actual launch drops the spaceship near the aqua planet, which has a normal city interface (so the user doesn't need to go through a flight tutorial every time he launches).

[EatMyDst]

I agree, that does sound like a good idea.

[klauss]

I imagine you downloaded the latest release, 0.5.0.

I should tell you, the development trunk in SVN already has a tutorial (with speech and all) upon launch.

A tutorial or intruduction before launch as you suggested isn't a bad idea, we'd need story/script writers to write a script for it (as in movie/tv script), so that someone else can integrate it (code the python scripts for it).

There's also some effort going on to update the manual which is, as you noticed, outdated even for 0.5.0. IIRC, there are spanish and french translations of the manual. Well, IIRC. I could easily translate it to spanish, I bet we have a german-speaking guy or two on the forums, and... well... you know how it goes.

A complex game like this cannot be self-explanatory as you seem to expect, but we're surely trying to make it more intuitive.

[huminado]

yes - even multiple tutorial planets could allow the user a feeling for flying around while still in the tutorial. I've seen this with some other open source games and it seemed to work quite well.

The more graphical the interface (i.e. less text) the more intuitive it can be without the need for localization (adding different languages). Unfortunately, with so much physics involved, there has to be some language - it's unavoidable. But in many instances, less is definitely more.