{"id":188,"date":"2009-12-05T10:09:54","date_gmt":"2009-12-04T21:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/?p=188"},"modified":"2009-12-05T10:09:54","modified_gmt":"2009-12-04T21:09:54","slug":"the-quest-for-an-intuitive-interface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/the-quest-for-an-intuitive-interface\/","title":{"rendered":"The quest for an intuitive interface"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the hardest bits about creating Icefall was getting the User Interface (UI) just right.
\nIcefall’s chief inspirations are “old-school” role-playing games like Angband (aka Roguelikes: Nethack, Moria, Omega, ADOM all fall into this category). But these old-school games all rely on essentially a text-mode interface with a myriad of hotkeys. I want to make Icefall more accessible than that. So I took the UI elements from ‘modern’ RPGs like World of Warcraft, Titan Quest, and Dragon Age: Orgins: hotbars, cooldowns, drag & drop.<\/p>\n

Of course these ‘modern’ interfaces are much more work to get right than a classic keyboard-driven one. Even though I’ve spent more time on this aspect than any other, it’s still not perfect. Here’s an example I found yesterday:<\/p>\n

\"Icefall
Icefall Backpack user interface<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Looks easy enough. To equip the Apprentice Jerkin, players can either click and drag it to their Character Sheet, or else right-click it to equip. The problem: there are two, identical jerkins in the player’s inventory. Click and drag works fine, but if you right-click the second one, a strange thing happens: the *other* jerkin is equipped instead, and disappears from inventory.<\/p>\n

Why? Well, right clicking an item in Icefall triggers a codepath to essentially “Activate Item: Apprentice Jerkin”.\u00a0It’s set up this way so that players can also drag equipment to their hotbar, and\u00a0equip it directly from there.\u00a0All good so far. BUT: internally, the inventory is stored as an array, and is stored from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. So when the “Activate Item” codepath is triggered, it goes looking for an Apprentice Jerkin to activate, and it finds the other jerkin (the one in the row above) first – so it activates it!<\/p>\n

A rare situation, a completely logical consequence of the way I implemented right-click behaviour. Technically correct (There are no downfalls to the player if the ‘wrong’ jerkin is equipped: they’re identical by definition) and yet it feels completely wrong and would likely alienate a casual user. So I’m going to have to find a workaround \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the hardest bits about creating Icefall was getting the User Interface (UI) just right. Icefall’s chief inspirations are “old-school” role-playing games like Angband (aka Roguelikes: Nethack, Moria, Omega, ADOM all fall into this category). But these old-school games all rely on essentially a text-mode interface with a myriad of hotkeys. I want to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2722,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[76,21],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-icefall","tag-icefall","tag-ui"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2722"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":190,"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paradicesoftware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}