Feedback Friday #88 - November 15-18, 2019

Feedback Friday is now open!

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What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
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• Be concise.
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How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. Every game has redeeming qualities.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #87 is here.

 

Ugh, sorry guys. Airbnb from hell. I have some now funny stories.

 

Would like some feedback on the UI for a trading menu I'm setting up for my game. Is it intuitive? Is any information missing or poorly presented? Is it fun?

WebGL Demo

You can fly between two stations in this demo, dock and buy/sell stuff between them.



There's a lot of placeholder stuff so I'm not looking for feedback on anything except the menu.

Thanks!

 

Nice! I played so much Privateer back in the day.

How do I sell? I don't see an intuitive way to switch from "buy" mode to "sell" mode.

Also, when buying, it would be helpful if out-of-stock items were shown slightly differently, such as slightly grayed out.

 

I think its a bit confusing for sure.

1 - buy and sell should be fully sorted.
2 - left click buy, right click sell (the buttons are unnatural)
3 - you should be able to sell stuff even at producer (but naturally, lower prices)
- so everything with a buy price should also have a sell price.

I think you could get rid of 'size' entirely.

The space ship bit is very cool, glad to see you fleshing this out!

 

I never played privateer, but this menu has a lot of influence from X2, which is a game that hooked me for hours on just trading, and is a big influence overall on the entire game.

You click right to add items to your cargo, left to put them back (or sell if you have some already in your cargo). Everything is on an 'order' system where you basically set up a positive(buy) or negative(sell) value for each item which gets processed at the end.

Good point. Thanks for the feedback!

 

Hey frosted, do you mean that they should have separate controls, be displayed in different UI, or both?

The way I see it, the point of reference is always the buyer (you) and your cargo hold. So when you click right it implies adding something to you (your ship), and left implies removal from you (your ship). Doing it with a reference to the trading station doesn't seem most intuitive to me. It's also how both the X series and Rebel Galaxy, the two games I am taking the most pointers from, are doing it.

In the X series, most stations do not buy what they sell, except for general trading stores which are basically 'walmarts' of space selling a lot of types of things. In these you get a pretty marginal profit, because they buy and sell at or close to the RRP. That's what I'm aiming to do here, so that if the player is not willing to go and find a specialized buyer, they can sell at these general stores and maybe make a bit of profit.

Size will matter with different cargo holds. Some items will be bulky and low margin (e.g. ore) whereas others will be small and high margin (e.g. refined gold). There will be different types of cargo holds with different types of upgrades. At the moment it seems superfluous yeah, but it won't be.

Thanks!

 

Since the heading of that section is "BUY", this wasn't clear at all to me. Just some feedback.

I agree with frosted that maybe you should be able to sort on different columns, such as price or size.

Privateer was a followup to Wing Commander. It was somewhat groundbreaking back in its day for its procedural mission generator, which was one of the major influences of Quest Machine. You could take missions to shoot pirates or escort merchants, but the main activity was flying to different ports to buy and sell goods, and upgrade your ship with the profits.

 

Cool, thats what I'm looking for. Having one UI seemed the most logical alongside a left/right sell/buy controls, but I can see it's not clear how to switch from buying to selling. Probably a hint above those arrows would help.

Ah I see. Agreed!

I'll have to check it out, though unfortunately I'm not good at stomaching outdated graphics. Looks like that game was one of the ancestors of the X series, and probably a lot of other games too.

 

Elite: Dangerous is a more modern incarnation.

 

Wrapping up this Feedback Friday. Want feedback on your project? Post in next weekend's Feedback Friday thread for free playtesting and feedback.

 

A bit late to the party but...

The UI is not bad at glance.
But I got feeling, there is Accept trade button missing.
You obviously accept trade, when clicking Finish Trading. But what if I want to cancel all, or simply I don't want accept my choices? Sure I can select each relevant item, and click cancel in Buy section.

Problem with position of Finish Trading button is, that the space ship as soon button is pressed, turns in the top/left corner direction. Shortcut like F key maybe would be suitable, to deal with that matter.

Buy header, may need change to
Sell / Buy





Also I would like see something like Opening price / starting price at the initialization of the trade. Then earning / cost of the trade, and total balance of the trade. And next to bu/sell price, purchase price of goods. I don't want sit with piece of paper, to note, how much I bought something for.
This way, you allow yourself, for more complex trades. Otherwise players may get frustrated "How much I bought that for?"

 

Good point, 'cancel all' is definitely necessary. I added the 'finish trading' button in a hurry but I will probably have the player do something with more intent there.

Yeah it's very much wip, that just needs a cursor lock and release upon exiting the menu.

Hmm I definitely hear everyone on the buy/sell not being clear. I'll have to figure out something there.

Well you can only really know the cost, not the earnings, least not until you sell it. An average price for the solar system or something like that would be good, but I'm not at that point yet. The real tell is how much stock the station has when you buy it, as the prices are directly proportional to stock.

I want there to be an element of intuition or instinct rather than just having all the data calculated for you and presented on a platter. It should be fairly clear if you're making a worthwhile purchase or not, perhaps less so how big that profit is going to be.

At this point I probably need to flesh out a network of trading stations to really test whether the menu has enough information for a player to grasp the fundamentals fast enough.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

What I mean is, if I bought 50 steel at 25 = 50 * 25 = 1250. Now you can calculate Unit price, by dividing back.
That will be the purchase price, in proposed column. It will not change in respect to the station where you trade.
Of course, if you buy extra steel at next station, lets say 10 * 20 = 200 then we add 1250 + 200 = 1450. Now unit price we bought steel, will be 1450 / ( 50 + 10 ) = 24.16(6).
Some people are not good in calculations. Or don't have as good memory. Is nothing to do with an intuition. Is just for fun. And even worse, if you have save/load game. It is impossible to know next day, or next month, how much good were bought for. If you know what I mean.

I played few trading games in past. Not knowing the purchase price is rather frustrating. Only few games have it really.
Other you need work with paper. But that is beyond casual playing. Depends what audience you targeting at.

Or at least allow people leave notes / comments in game.

 

Agree with @Antypodish on knowing the price you bought something at.

In reality it doesn't really matter, since as player you should generally just try to get the best price - but it 'feels' better to know if you made a profit and if so how much.

It's like seeing your damage numbers in combat.

 

But what if you buy some number of units from station A, buy more units from station B, and then sell them all at station C? I'm not sure that it's practical to tell you the price you bought them at, since potentially you'd have to record the price for every individual unit of that product type.