UI Suggestions, screen by screen

[Reenen]

From my other discussion (in the dev's corner), the game need to decide Game/App. My preference is "Game" because the whole point is the AI. So these suggestions go towards "Game".

First things first, is the main game window (1st window).

• Maximize the window. (In fact maximize all windows, or keep all windows the same size). If you want to keep the forest picture, scale/stretch it, or tile it. Personally I'd make it black, with "Forge" written quite fancy somewhere in the middle, or watermarked beneath the menu options.
• Only have these 5 buttons: Deck Editor, New Game, Continue Game, Options & Tools and Quit (no Menubar!)
• Maybe "How to play" could be here too. That screen could use a nicer font, some images, and general rework, but that's a post for a later time.

Now I'll go through each of the menu items and stuff on the screen and organise them in there (a lot will go under options & tools).
Deck Editor

• This should just open the deck editor. (I'll have a 2nd post and further post per other windows)
• The deck editor should/could have a way to set the default decks to the "New game" Constructed part.
• The part that is currently under "Options -> Generate Deck -> Remove 1/1 and 0/X creatures", and "Remove Artifacts"" should be here. (Note: there is a lost " on the current menu item)

New Game

• Should go to a new window/panel, asking whether you want to play "Constructed, Sealed Deck, Booster Draft, or Quest".
• Depending on what the player chooses, he'll need to either start a draft, sealed, quest, or for constructed, select the decks he wishes to use. Thereafter to the game!

Continue Game

• Have a list of "saved" games, whether they be draft, constructed, sealed or quest.

Options and Tools
This will obviously be the most complicated of the screens. There are several options one would like to hide far away, and others that are more useful. Community feedback from people who've played much longer than I have would be useful here, but for now I'll guess.
Current list of options available on the main screen (not covered yet) is: New Gui, Stack AI Land, Developer Mode, Display Options, Update Price, Download Card HQ Pictures, Download Card LQ Pictures, Download Set LQ Pictures, Import Pictures, Specify Card Size, Specify max stack size (?), Specify Stack Offset, Stack Report, Use LAF Fonts, Use mana and text card overlay, and Scale images larger than original.

So from this list, I'd remove Developer Mode (I dunno what it does, but developers should have a more obfuscated back door than this!), Display options (almost all of the themes bugs out, and I don't believe people bother too much with this), . Others I'll bunch together into smaller subgroups (Stack Options, Card Options & Tools etc.) Also I have no idea what use LAF font does, so currently I've removed it. One could have a display options as well, with this and maybe clump the current "Card Options" into display options.

• Card Options (Update Prices, Download Images (then ask for LQ/HQ for Set or All), Import Pictures*, Specify Card Size, Scale Images larger than original**, Use Mana and Text card overlay)
• AI Options (Stack AI Land, there may be more to come!)
• Stack Options (These may be AI options, as I have no idea what these do, Max Stack Size, Stack Offset)

*: The import pictures didn't work properly for me, but maybe I didn't do it well, I manually pasted the download in the right folder, and it just worked (TM).
**: Personally I feel the developers should make the choice and the rest of the community has to live with it. But that's IMO. My choice would be to scale larger than original, and in some cases it may look stupid, but usually it's fine.

Apologies I left the "use mana and text overlay" out of these mockups. And in looking at these I'm not so sure about the black background. Maybe that forest with the forge label? Anyway...

[jeffwadsworth]

The Developer mode allows you to:
1. Add lots of mana to your pool.
2. View the contents of the "hidden" zones.

Essential for testing.

[craygz]

imo the "app"-approach if i understand your differentiation between those terms correctly has some elements that are worth keeping.

exactly because the strong-suite of forge is the AI it makes the game playable alongside doing something serious: you can just tab to a different window, or give half the screen to the forge window and work on the rest (assuming a sufficiently big monitor setup) and return to it whenever you feel like it.
a (fullscreen) "game" you either play, or you don't: continuous dedication is required - while currently i can start up forge to bridge the few minutes a rendering completes.
in that regard a cascaded/multilayered menu is counterproductive because it increases the time you have to wade through menus.
games can be as short as 10 turns in constructed formats - i would think twice to click through 4 layers of menus if i just want to play the game for a minute.

if you want to designing menus intelligently you have to take into account the frequency specific options are used.
if in 90% of the cases you want to start a new draft, constructed or sealed game or want to continue a quest it does not make much sense to drop the user off in a window where the user can start neither.
hiding options you likely will only change once (or once a week at best) obviously does make sense.
the perceived reduction of complexity by burrowing stuff into deeply nested menus is a lie.

especially if you want to increase the amount of screen estate force occupies the move to reduce the content of every individual frame seems converse.

i'm not sure how much sense it would make in forges current stage of development to invest time into a save system that saves specific game states.

[lord of 13]

What about using a hammer-and-anvil type logo? For example, the quick mockup I threw together...

[Rob Cashwalker]

See this thread for some of our past work on possible logo screens:

viewtopic.php?f=26&t=2757