Sandbox Forumsthinking about the em ui87
sl0nderman
just was thinking about the EM interface. really I have no problems with the core of it, a text box and vote checker is all the game really needs to work. but i think it's a large problem for newer players etc. like notice how noavis always veg so i was thinking about how it can be improved.
ive been playing a lot of planet coaster so maybe this is my management sim side kicking in
in my perfect scenario parts of the UI would be modular so if you played BGO you would know that aspects of the game like (chat, inventory, player list, and main game window) can be resized at will depending on what the player wants. i'll expand on this idea in other examples but you'll see what I mean.
ok for the first example of a module i did the town meeting screen
so there's some things to note about this. so you'll notice the graphic and i think having pretty pictures is a good step forward in making the game easier to understand. my idea is that the person who is currently majority voted gets their name and avatar put up on the noose. this idea comes from emjack of course which places vote count next to the name on the vote list.
next comes the players vote. on their screen it will ALWAYS be the top box instead of a random place on the voting list. then of course comes the rest of the votes (yes i realize they don't perfect match up with the number). if you'll notice i chose some longer names here on purpose. if one wished too, they could expand the box and get rid of the ellipses.
so the first thing you might notice is that i'm at 140% zoom which is the minimum to display everything at once normally without scrolling so i decided to try and fit everything into that space as a general guide
so its' kinda cluttered at this point but theres a huge amount of space wasted on either side of the game so we can even expand further
now it may look messy at first and that's largely because i didn't mess with stuff like font sizes and fine tuning yet but something like this can look compact yet show a lot of information
so here's the game i screenshotted for the above mock ups and like
ok so in databases you have something called primary keys which is the point of data to which other data is related. if you look at the game you see that the primary key is the name of the user (more accurately the user id number). to each username is linked: an avatar, a role, and a vote. so why is the name repeated when all 3 of these things could be displayed in one column.
i think this works really well like now names aren't listed twice (in a different order no less). i'm sure it was easier to make initially but i think it really polishes down to this form .
original
concept
so i moved some things around what you might notice is that items are on the left instead of the right, a BIG RADICAL change that veteran em players might have to adapt to much like the icon changes ;)but the idea of this design is that left: everything personal and right: meetings and such
it also might look a little rough because i didn't use anything to make sure that things line up or anything to make the scaling perfect but that's been this whole thread i'm not putting in that kind of effort (yet)
i'm really liking this personally what do you think
original
updated
so a few things about this. first i added the number of players to the title. i figure this is really a cosmetic thing who needs to know exactly but it fits fine. secondly i added a space for points to be shown for ranked games. third i removed the mafia table it just takes up too much room to work i think. just a list of players and names could work. under the meeting mafia list would be the non meeting mafia list but there are none in t his game.
the top is driver or similar role
the bottom is like fab or something
having them positioned like this really lets you know the direction of the action. i think driver is very unclear to someone who doesn't know how the game works.
alternatively there could be unique backgrounds at night depending on one's role
so ROUGHLY karma is a gauge about how likeable a user is. so what if you want to mark down that you want to avoid a user? i don't think a thumbs down is a good idea (it gets too close to bullying if something like -karma appears on the profile stats) but what if there was a client only thumbs down?
so you click this button on a user box and you consider them "avoid"
so when they join a game with you or you join a game with them you get the message "A user you want to avoid is in this game." now this probably could be done with a simple user script but here's how it can tie into the site as a whole. say someone gets a violation for lobby camping (when you join a user's game specifically to bother time over and over). when this happens bother users can AUTOMATICALLY get an avoid warning when they are in a game together. but honestly wouldn't you want a notification when {user you hate here} joined your game? much less harsh than an autokick script if you ask me
*disclaimer i don't want to avoid CRTcosmos he was just in a game i was in when I was thinkin about this
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