Warfare Information

Hey all,

I've stepped onto one of those classic designer traps, and failed my Reflex save. 

I know my combat engine back and forth. The Bandits do not fear me. I've memorized every stat (because I decided them). I'm a walking JSON library.  Which is cool and all, unless... I happen to not be me.

Aah, you know what I mean.

How do I convey the rules and combat information effectively for the new player? There's two opposing extremes to consider avoiding: Information glut and information starvation.

Despite all the fun of the sin of gluttony in general, information-based gluttony is not exciting at all. If I give you too much information to manage in a combat setting, you'd be overwhelmed, indecisive, a little pissed off... and rightly so!

How do you make sense of this?

How many enemies are in this battle scene? Which character is supposed to be Kira? What are those weird grey dotted lines? Why is there an unnecessary space in the tooltip? Why do the colored rings have black sections? Why does one of the PCs have a ghost connected by a green/blue line? Why does the guy on the left have black tentacles coming out of him? Which enemy is closest to taking the ol' dirt nap? What's with the coral snake on the bottom left? These are NOT the questions I want you to have to ask.

(If you noticed that one of the characters has a weird black outline, nice one. I'm experimenting with better pixel art to make combatants pop out more. What do you think?)

Here's what I want you to be able to gather from this scene:

•  Kira is selected. She's the one with the dark complexion and green shirt. She has some movement, as well as one action left.

• There are two bad guys. The outside one is nearly dead and facing away (thus the red of the ring indicates their vision) and the other is menacing the bald gentleman or gentlelady. (That's not a beard, it's a tactical turtleneck! How dare you!)

• Kira's "ghost" indicates a position she can move to. If she moves to that spot, it'll cost her action. BUT she'll have line of sight on both bad guys: one west through the window, the other south of her. 

• Since attacking costs an action, that would be all she could do. But if either of those bad guys moves on THEIR turn, she'll get a Reaction on them. (This would be shown with blue dotted lines instead of grey, but there's a bug that makes it not show yet.)

• The coral snake is actually just some wiring that can be picked up. I agree, it would be infinitely cooler if it were a snake instead.

Is this the right amount of information? Could more information be added/removed? These are the questions I'm asking myself this week. But I'm definitely enjoying the process.

If you've read this far, fellow ludologist, I invite you to give me your impressions. Consider this a discussion piece and leave a comment. Or better yet, download the early demo and tell me what you think. 

With my unfair cheaty 'wrote the engine himself' knowledge, my odds of victory are about 2 to 1, but I haven't had a play tester beat the Bandits... yet! 

Cheers,

PajamaWolf