I will say I do like the new Icons for each of the damage/support types. They are distinct enough from one another in the current UI, but the changes made here (that prayer has been replaced with a variant of the symbol on priestess’s robes, and thus the color change for spell damage going from yellow to blue) make them distinct in both shape and color.
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The icons are clear, and speak well for what they are.
I advise move the weight number to the upper right. Given how close the capacity and weight numbers are, and considering they’ll both be changing constantly,
I can see some contesting for attention right there. The segments, right now, are indeed a tidbit redundant, but helpful when taking a quick glimpse, making it optional would be nifty, but that sounds like something to add WAY further in the future.
last note, and i know you didn’t ask, but the overlapping of the text and numbers in the lower right could prove problematic in the future.
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I’m now having difficulty reading the numbers over the magic zap symbol (white and cyan? merge together), and also the countdown on the thief’s attack (red and black merge together) - I’m protanomalous.
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I really don’t think the weight numbers add anything in combat, as they are mainly of after battle importance. It’d be a big cleaner without them cluttering up the battle screen and even clipping with what I assume it the attack cooldown/countdown.
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In terms of the icons, I do like the difference between the attack (having the actual sword or shield with minor detail) with the food type boxes, helps to focus exactly what is needed. I will say the bottom of the character portraits is a bit clustered (using the warrior as an example) so maybe shrink the weight a tiny bit or maybe move the capacity bar somewhere else like the right as it doesn’t have anything going there or possibly the top as several of the portraits have some dead space up there to use when the get heavier (though the bottom does make some sense ).
Otherwise everything else looks great, can still read everything easily.
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Honestly really like the direction the design is taking. I actually was wondering how you would take things, since the original design felt very empty and bare bones, but it didn’t feel like there was much you could do to improve it either. I feel like the borders and some of the new icons fit in with the style of the characters and their backgrounds, and the background itself adds to what seemed to just be a void. Liking the design so far! A couple suggestions though:
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I definitely agree with Durandol with the weight numbers, as it provides information that isn’t really necessary at the time being. Plus, personally, it would leave the knowledge of when characters’ next weight stage is hit to a mystery, and will become less of a focus for the time being. I’m sure others will disagree with this, but I personally find less specifics at that moment a positive.
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I like what you’ve done with the border color of the main cast representing the color of their food preference. I don’t think it’s be a bad idea for the enemies to have the same.
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Still feel like the items are too out of the way for casual players to really consider. This was an issue I had with the previous design, but I don’t really know of any solution to fix that
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I think the numbers for Room and Time might be a wee bit too close to the name. Either some rearranging or adding some thick black outlines to the font could help look a little less melded together
Other than that, the progress is really good! Can’t wait to see the final product
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Just wanted to throw my two cents into the whole UI discussion, but first of all I wanna say that I like where it’s going, it’s starting to look really nice!
Now, I for one would still like it if the weight numbers didn’t get removed, for the simple reason that it is fun to see the numbers go up once you start digesting, there’s a reason why MMORPG’s were so popular with it’s big numbers and such. But like Seeker said, perhaps tone down the font size a bit, as it’s taking up quite a lot of space when it doesn’t need to.
And about the various cooldowns, I feel that having both a circle that ticks down and a number on top of it is a little overkill, just having one or the other should be more than enough to convey when the thing is about to come off cooldown. I dunno how difficult this would be to implement, but if you still want more than one visual helper for the player to spot cooldown timers, you could perhaps have the Darkened Overlay (See: When characters get KO’d, or items are on CD) go down from top to bottom, and that would work well together with the timers without cluttering the screen too much. (Hopefully you understood what I meant, I’m not the best with terms and such! 
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Yeah I wanted to try them out, but I don’t think I like them either
Yup!
Thank you!
Hmm, I don’t know if I like this. Since the number scales quite high I’m worried it will overlap with the character’s face, which I want to keep unobscured.
I think the overlap looks cool, maybe I can just make them different colors to differentiate the texts?
Thank you for pointing this out. I will make sure to pay more attention to colorblindness accessibility in mockup 3
I think the numbers are nice to know, especially since its a game about weight gain. But I think you’re right, and they should be de-emphasized
I think that’s mostly the fault of the attack timer being overlayed on the top of the bar, which I agree that it definitely needs to be moved
I don’t want UI elements on all sides of the portrait, that would make it really cluttered. I’d like to keep it to 2 sides
Hmm, that might be fun
My original reasoning for the black border was to emphasize their non-interactableness, but I’m coming around to this idea
What to do with the items has been a problem I’ve spent a long time trying to solve
This might work
Hmm I think this is really interesting. I’d like to try it out!
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if the weight segments in the bar ar based on 100% you can drop the weight number and keep it as a percentile base indicator. I deam them necessary only because i like information like that.
Having the character border as a color based on their food type is cool, but it would also be cool if the enemies had that as well so you can match color to color. also for new people it would provide a visual explanation.
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I imagined the ticks in mockup 2 to based off flat values, like every small mark is 5 and every major mark is 25. That way the density of marks can also communicate who has high capacity
I think colorizing the enemy borders is a good idea
Personally, I like seeing the weight numbers go up while in the dungeon. And since I also like to very carefully control which sprite each one uses, seeing the numbers makes it much easier.
As far as the cooldowns, I need to see how many seconds are left so that I know which of my support characters can reset it at that time, otherwise I wind up either using a support and not ending the cooldown, or using a support for a small cooldown when I should have saved it for a larger cooldown and used a different support.
Also, if you are going to use borders instead of icons for food preference, the enemies need to have the same thing. The food-change items would also need an update, to show what they do (took me a while to figure out the food types and the food-change items as it is now, and having icons in some places and borders in others would make it worse)
I do think the idea of the KO/Cooldown overlay scrolling from top to bottom would work quite well, as long as the numbers are still visible.
I do have a few questions: first, are you planning on adding in more food-change items, and the final upgrades for the items that don’t have them yet? A few of the more recent levels don’t have any rewards fo getting an A or higher. Second, is the time grading for the Milk Dragon fight correct? I had a really hard time getting an A, and I don’t think an S is possible without a Macro due to the number of screens and the number of enemies. My best so far is still 5 seconds above an S. Third, are you planning on adding more sprites to the two newer characters (spellblade and knight)? I noticed they don’t have any new sprites past ~350.
Fourth, and this is a big one, how exactly does the KO system work? At first I thought it was any time a character went over their max capacity, then I thought it was anytime they went over 2x capacity, then I figured out the food type mechanic and thought that had to do with it, and now after extensive testing I have yet to figure out how it works. I cam make a character instantly KO just for going above their max capacity on a food type they like, and I can make a character not KO all the way up to 2x capacity on a food they don’t like. I can make a support character KO for going over capacity and make another not KO all the way up to 2x capacity. So I would really like a clear explanation of what triggers the KO system.
Fifth, is there any way you could make this work offline, or at least have offline save files, so that we don’t lose progress if we have to close our browser? I understand if this isn’t possible, it would just be a nice feature.
Overall, I love the game, and hope to see what you do with it in the future.
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I’ll try my best to answer some of your questions. For the second one, the milk dragon fight and all the levels added with it have the same clear time bonuses. This is because Bewildered_Angel is still tweaking the cool down time formula, and thinks it’s unnecessary to give them clear time bonuses based on the stages themselves since they’ll likely have to be retimed for the formula. It is possible to get S-rank, but probably very hard. My best time is around 16 seconds, but that was probably with all adventurers at low weight and they were upgraded to power 50-65 depending on adventure and speed and metabolism in the 60s and 70s. I’m also playing on an ipad as opposed to a computer, so that could be a factor too.
For the third question, they will get more weight levels. The spellblade should get more in the next update after the new UI is added. Bewildered Angel has been updating this game in groups of updates, and based on the schedule on his/her/their patreon, it seems the next groups follow the pattern of adding a new adventurer, adding new levels, adding one set of new weight levels to *adventurers from previous groups of updates, and a miscellaneous update, not necessarily in that order. Spellblade gets more weight levels in this group of updates, and both the spellblade and knight will get weight levels in the next group of updates.
For the fourth question, i’m pretty sure Bewildered_Angel said that when an adventurer’s fullness goes above their capacity, there’s a chance with every attack that they’ll get KO’d.
For the fifth one, it should save as long as you aren’t playing on incognito mode or your preferred browser’s equivalent since it uses site cookies. If you aren’t playing on incognito mode, i’m not sure what could be causing it not to save.
*Adventurers only get 2 sets of weight levels added. The second time they get weight levels added is the final time. For example, the spell blade was added in the last group of updates, will get a set of weight levels added in this group of updates, and her final and the knight’s 2nd weight levels will be added in the next group of updates.
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I’m not sure if this has been answered before, but do you plan on adding unique sprites for when an adventurer gets knocked out? It could be something simple like having their eyes closed and maybe frowning.
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I wish I had an tablet to play this on. Try to get S-rank repeatedly for farming is starting to give me CTS in my mouse hand. Being able to use a touchscreen would be better, but my phone is to small to be able to play comfortably. Making it to where you can click/tap on a character and then click/tap on another character or enemy instead of having to drag would be even better.
If it’s using cookies, that would explain the problem. I have my browser set to wipe all data except favorites and logins when it closes, which would include the cookies the game uses to save.
The KO being random explains a lot. It must include the attack that put them over, though, as I have had a character KO when the attack put them over capacity. Also, it seems that going over 2x capacity is a guaranteed KO.
And the new UI/appearance update will likely throw a wrench into the update pattern, as that is a lot of both programming and art assets. Nice to know there is some sort of schedule/pattern, though.
Thanks for answering what you can, though.
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How are you doing this? My fastest time with spellblade is 33 seconds, and that’s with me clicking and dragging as fast as I can. Asside from using a macro or cranking my dps up to ridiculous levels I really don’t see how this is possible. There are over 30 enemies in that level, and while the cooldown for the spellblade starts at 0.4 and really only goes up to ~0.6 by the end of the run that’s still insanely fast. That leaves less than 0.2 seconds to click and drag to each enemy. Even just gettting 24 seconds would require less than a quarter of a second to click and drag to each enemy. How did you do it?
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putting it in a smaller window size. mind you there is a chance to miss the target, so long as Spellblade is at the front of the party and you have good speed, you should be able to reach about sub 25 so long as the spell blade doesn’t go over capacity… and doesn’t have points in metabolism
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Yeah, I figured out the ‘no metabolism’ trick. I put over 200 points into the witch’s metabolism so I could buff her through Cakes from Hell as the first farming area, but for this farm I figured it was based on the spellblade’s insane attack speed, which would mean that using buffs to reset the attack timers would be too slow.
I hadn’t though of using a smaller window, though. I might have to try that. I did have the spellblade in the upper right slot and had enough capacity that only the last enemy put her over (which doesn’t matter). I also had a knight with super high strength give the spell-blade a shield at the start so she wouldn’t have to worry about attacks dropping her strength too low.
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That’s a good point
I think I’m going to go with icons and borders, simultaneously
I will continue to added items of all types
As stated earlier in the thread, there is a chance to KO. The chance is based on how much over capacity you go, which scales from 0% at matching capacity to 100% at double capacity. For example: 52/50 would have a 4% chance to KO, 75/50 would be 50%, 95/50 would be 90%
Offline savefiles is something I’m considering but I haven’t made a decision about it yet. Saves are currently stored as cookies in your browser
I like this idea, but I haven’t decided yet if I want to do it
I like this idea, I might use it
The nice thing about the mockups is that it already generates like 80% of the assets that are needed. Once the final mockup is decided, I anticipate the UI will be done in only 1 or 2 weeks
if you load the page before you go offline it will hold the save and all its data
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So, I just discovered an interesting bug: if you click on the exit button too soon after it appears (when the level starts), then it will break. Permanently. I was also unable to select a different level after completing the level I was doing. The only option was to do the next level in the list.
It completely changed the game. I couldn’t just go back to an earlier level so I could strip the weight from a character. It almost felt like Darkest Dungeon, having to manage weight and trying to figure out who best to strip weight from based on the next mission, as well as carefully choosing which character(s) to put points into. Also, since I couldn’t exit the level early, if I got stuck because I brought the wrong characters, I had to slowly whittle down the enemies until I got out.
Personally, I like the game as intended, but this ‘hardcore’ experience was certainly interesting. The only fix was to refresh the page, which restored everything to its intended function.
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