Wokste, thanks for your well reasoned comments. You have made a lot of good suggestions!
(1) You don't really need to know which slot is your weapon slot unless the weapon is already equipped, in which case it is obvious. However, adding background icons to each slot is a good idea. I will just need to find a set of appropriate background icons :)
(2) There are actually a lot more right click items available than you realize (more than 10), so always having them present would be a bit much. However, in the specific case of "Equip" I think you have a good idea; I could just add a disabled button to the menu when you don't have enought AP to equip.
(3) You can resize all the windows that are not popups in the game. This is intentional and quite useful if you have a lot of items in one window or if you choose to play at a higher resolution and want to use more of your screen real estate.
The only windows you can't resize are those which block all other input (like the world map and the conversation window. (The conversation window should be resizable, but that is an additional feature that will take quite a bit of work; it is on my list!)
(4) This is a very solid idea that I probably wouldn't have thought of. Thanks!
(5) Yeah you are right. I just got lazy when I was doing the tutorial.
(6) Some area transitions are two way, some are one way. I agree making the tutorial transition two way makes sense.
(7) This is a good point. It is initially confusing to a newbie. I'm not sure I want to show all available locations right at the start though, as there could be a lot of them. I will have to think about how to address this.
(8) I can see how this can be confusing. I think you are right that having creatures die at less than 1 HP is probably best.
Thanks for those bug reports. You can fix issue #4 for yourself by creating a "core/" directory in your Hale directory and extracting core.zip into that directory. I am working on a permanent fix. I am also working on the issues with the Tutorial that you described.
verbalshadow:
Thanks for your feedback! If you get a chance to play it and have any more specific ideas about how the interface could be improved, let me know!
Thanks for taking a look! You were actually nearly through the Tutorial at that point. What happened was a bug - a Trap that was supposed to fire only once instead fired twice, killing your character.
Thanks for pointing that out along with the Java compiler version issue - I didn't even think about that when I did the release.
If you are at all interested I would suggest you try playing through the TestCampaign a bit. You can create your own party of up to 3 characters, and there is quite a bit of content there.
I am going to release another version 0.2.1 addressing these issues immediately.
Hi eleazzaar,
Yes, I grabbed most of the terrain graphics from Wesnoth quite a while ago. I should copy over the newer graphics at some point.
Wokste, thanks for your well reasoned comments. You have made a lot of good suggestions!
(1) You don't really need to know which slot is your weapon slot unless the weapon is already equipped, in which case it is obvious. However, adding background icons to each slot is a good idea. I will just need to find a set of appropriate background icons :)
(2) There are actually a lot more right click items available than you realize (more than 10), so always having them present would be a bit much. However, in the specific case of "Equip" I think you have a good idea; I could just add a disabled button to the menu when you don't have enought AP to equip.
(3) You can resize all the windows that are not popups in the game. This is intentional and quite useful if you have a lot of items in one window or if you choose to play at a higher resolution and want to use more of your screen real estate.
The only windows you can't resize are those which block all other input (like the world map and the conversation window. (The conversation window should be resizable, but that is an additional feature that will take quite a bit of work; it is on my list!)
(4) This is a very solid idea that I probably wouldn't have thought of. Thanks!
(5) Yeah you are right. I just got lazy when I was doing the tutorial.
(6) Some area transitions are two way, some are one way. I agree making the tutorial transition two way makes sense.
(7) This is a good point. It is initially confusing to a newbie. I'm not sure I want to show all available locations right at the start though, as there could be a lot of them. I will have to think about how to address this.
(8) I can see how this can be confusing. I think you are right that having creatures die at less than 1 HP is probably best.
CruzR,
Thanks for those bug reports. You can fix issue #4 for yourself by creating a "core/" directory in your Hale directory and extracting core.zip into that directory. I am working on a permanent fix. I am also working on the issues with the Tutorial that you described.
verbalshadow:
Thanks for your feedback! If you get a chance to play it and have any more specific ideas about how the interface could be improved, let me know!
All,
I have released a new version, 0.2.1:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hale/files/hale-0.2.1.zip/download
This addresses the two issues reported by Charlie as well as a few other things.
This version is compatible with Java 6 or greater. I apologize to anyone who downloaded the previous version and had trouble.
Many thanks!
Hi Charlie,
Thanks for taking a look! You were actually nearly through the Tutorial at that point. What happened was a bug - a Trap that was supposed to fire only once instead fired twice, killing your character.
Thanks for pointing that out along with the Java compiler version issue - I didn't even think about that when I did the release.
If you are at all interested I would suggest you try playing through the TestCampaign a bit. You can create your own party of up to 3 characters, and there is quite a bit of content there.
I am going to release another version 0.2.1 addressing these issues immediately.