UI roadmap - discussion of recent and future changes

[drdev]

Thanks guys for this discussion. The "Career mode" now being discussed for offline play is what I was thinking originally, and I like the name you guys came up with.

I agree we should limit network support enough to not threaten MTGO, as I would hate to see this project shut down.

[swordshine]

There are three unimplemented cards related to turn order/direction: Mystic Barrier, Order of Succession, and Time Distortion. If someone sets up basic UI to show the order of the game (very essential for multiplayers and to implement those three cards), that would be great.

[drdev]

I just created a new thread discussing a new game mode idea I have. I thought I'd link to it from this thread since it is a proposal for future UI changes, plus that way people who don't scroll down to the non-stickied threads have a better chance of finding it.

http://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=14721

[Agetian]

Recently I had a discussion with a friend of mine who plays a lot of Forge these days. He came up with some interesting ideas for the future UI development so I decided to consolidate and post them here for consideration.

1) Arrow tweaks. An interesting targeting mode might be to have the non-combat targeting arrows set to always-visible, but with some appearance tweaks. For instance, it could be possible to make those arrows much thinner—just a couple pixels wide, probably with no border, maybe even no need to draw an arrowhead either. Make the arrows (or "connecting lines" I guess we could call them, if they don't have heads) a subtle, unobtrusive color, perhaps with transparency. When the line would need to (as it is now) route over another card in its path, have it instead pass under that card (i.e. lower its "Z-value" to below that of cards).
Emphasis would still be possible—when hovering over a "connected" pair of cards, the connecting line could temporarily pass over incident cards (Z-value raised), and the line could glow brighter (in fact, this would be a good place to play with some simple animation, which Forge doesn't have much of right now unfortunately—the brighter color could "flow" in the direction of the "arrow"). This emphasis should also occur when a "connection" is first created—for example, when a blocker is declared or an aura is attached. If animated, this would smoothly illustrate the event that just occurred, without the player having to hover with the mouse or read the stack text.

2) Other event highlights. For years now, the main way to direct a player's attention to an event (such as a spellcast or ability activation) has been to show the related card's pic in the "focused card" viewbox. This has always been suboptimal, but not much has changed other than the (good) decision to place miniature card pics next to stack text. There have always been issues with events that don't use the stack, such as Land stuff, suspending a card, etc. One of the main problems is that the focused card viewbox is doing double duty: sometimes the game shows a card there for an event, but also any card/stack event your mouse happens to touch will be drawn there. There are a couple ways to help make things clearer:
- Modification to the focused card viewbox itself. This is potentially the slightly easier solution, but also IMO not as cool as the other idea below. But basically this idea is to segment the box in some way, so that the place where "important" cards are being shown is separate from the "mouseover" focus area. This could be done via a "picture in picture" layout, for example.
- Graphically emphasizing important cards right on the battlefield. This is the main idea. Basically, instead of "merely" being shown in the big zoomed card box, important cards on the battlefield would receive a "glow effect" around them temporarily (note that this doesn't have to be animated if you don't want—it can be achieved by a colored border that statically fades-to-transparent in color value).

3) Fundamental animations. These would be the lowest priority of the formulated suggestions, but adding them would help Forge feel more like a traditional game, as well as aiding the player in seeing what events are currently transpiring.
- Simple tap animation. Right now, cards instantly go from untapped to tapped with no transitional animation—adding one would give the eye more time to notice that "something potentially important is happening."
- A "going to the graveyard" animation. This could be as simple as the card picture fading out instead of instantly disappearing, or you could have more fun with it and do something with movement and/or particle effects.
- Animate battlefield layout changes. This would be the most significant one, IMO. Right now, it can be pretty jarring how the battlefield can rearrange from one frame to the next (for example, when you cast your first creature, so all of a sudden lands move to a new row and "shrink" to make room). Animating this process a bit, even using very short-duration animations akin to what Nintendo games used back in the day, would make things feel a lot more fluid.

- Agetian

[drdev]

I've long wanted to support animations for at least the mobile app. I just haven't found the time as of yet. Something I wanted to do as part of that was actually create some visual effects for attacking and certain spell abilities, like a sword slash effect when a weapon weilding creature damages a creature or player, a talon slash for beast-type creatures, a lightning strike for lightning-based direct damage effects, etc. If anyone with any graphic design skills would want to create the images (and maybe sounds) for such effects, I could do the programming.