I posted an entire thread (possibly two) on how you could do this and you seem to have completely failed to pass it on to the people who probably needed to see it. Looks like that was three years ago!
Please reorder the Victory cards more sensibly
Moving Forward
Nonetheless, let’s try to move forward with what you have done.
You’re right that this was long (LONG) overdue. There are some good elements here, but this cannot be the final version.
There are problems:
- There’s a bug where you have to press Continue twice, mainly noticeable when there are fewer rewards.
- There’s another bug, where the level of an upgraded chest in a Delve is not displayed, despite the accompanying text suggesting it should be.
- As people have pointed out, a Minor Traitstone is NOT more important than VPs! (And similar in other modes.
- You have inexplicably thrown away all links between Gnomes (etc) and their drops. This was an important and smart innovation the last time you many any adjustments at all to the Victory screen. Throwing it away seems both ignorant of the history of the game and … well … pretty dumb. (ie: Rewards from Gnomes had a lighter image of the Gnome from which they came on the card background.)
- You absolutely could have fit everything onto a single screen, if you’d thought about your design a bit longer. A real missed opportunity, I fear.
Some of the good elements are that we can see more of our rewards at once, and that the Shrines elements no longer get in the way of more important things (that was a clever design choice). (I assume you tested it all on mobile phones and it’s not too small. I don’t personally care, but mobile players absolutely will!)
Disturbingly, you have a history of not allowing any time in the schedule for tweaking new designs after launch. This is a major flaw in your processes, and I can only hope that you are able to adjust them to actually spend some time fixing the problems and making things better based on our feedback (not just mine). So, the next section is me trying to cling to hope that you might actually do the right thing.
Suggestions
Let’s say that the current version of the Victory Screen is v3.0, and that the previous version was v2.5 (I assume there was something completely different when the game launched). In my opinion, we need a version 3.5 in the very next version of the game (whether it be v8.4, 8.5, 9.0 or whatever).
Here’s some of what I think you need to do that would both restore things you’ve thrown away and fix the existing problems – plus some random tweaks:
- Fix the double-Continue bug (of course). And the Delve Chest level bug (include the new level number).
- Move standard/common rewards out of the rewards list and put them on either side of the centre panel. Depending on how much space you think you have, you can fit either 4 or 6 items there, including the Shrine and XP progress bars. The obvious stuff to move is: Gold, Souls and XP on the left; and Trophies, Class XP (with a progress bar) and Treasure Maps on the right.
- The progress bar for XP and Class XP should include progress numbers, not just a progress bar.
- Once a Class has been fully levelled, either completely remove its XP-gain indicator from the Victory screen, or make it clear that the amount shown is the amount that would have been gained if a non-maxed class had been selected. The latter is a harder design problem, but I prefer it because information does not disappear completely. For example, someone who has maxed all their classes can still tell their early-game friend how much Class XP is granted by different kinds of battle.
- Restore the Gnome/Valraven/special-monster backgrounds that indicate the source of each reward for all rewards tied to a specific enemy rather than the battle as a whole. I suspect tiny icons of the gnomes would be far too small on most devices, so go back to something similar to what you were doing before.
- What appears in the centre panel. This should absolutely depend on the game mode!!! I cannot emphasise this enough! For example, if I’m playing the Vault (and probably GaPs), I want all four Gnome rewards to appear in the centre panel. If I’m playing PvP, I want VPs in the centre panel. If I’m playing Delves, definitely chest upgrades, but probably also room rewards. In Tower of Doom, Scrolls and room rewards. You need to think about what a player actually cares about in each mode.
- Take account of how far the player has progressed in the game. Minor Traitstones are completely meaningless to me as a reward, since I have over 50,000 of each colour. Only Celestial Traitstones might have some meaning to me, but even then I have over 3,000 of them. It’s a similar concept to downplaying Class XP once a class is maxed. I would rather you leave the centre panel empty than show me a Minor Traitstone!
- When you have a special event on, such as the 10th Anniversary Event (congrats!), where points were accumulated for killing certain colours of enemy, I suggest a break-out box in one of the corners. This should also include a progress bar and numeric text, where appropriate. (Same for Kingdom Event Battle Crashers.) I know we’re running out of real estate, but I think it can be done. Realise that there’s quite a lot of space to the right of the “Victory” graphic on most screens (though this might depend on the battle type, as well).
- The biggest consumer of screen real-estate currently is the Continue button. On a wide-screen monitor (or on a mobile phone), it just doesn’t need to be that wide! Please be smart and set some minimum and maximum widths relative to the screen dimensions and font size. I’m tempted to move it to the right to free up space for other things, but I suspect that would be a bad idea. Instead, use the space to the left of the button, and perhaps put the special event points (previous suggestion) to the right of it.
- Here’s the big one: Allow the “battle rewards list” to wrap over two lines, instead of scrolling sideways.
Battle Rewards List
My last suggestion merits its own section. What makes it tricky is, of course, that you have to test it for different display aspect ratios and font sizes. Indeed, you already have a big problem here. I place in a 1920x1080 PC window and on a 2560x1440 iPad – and occasionally on a wider phone at a lower resolution. You need to be testing from the widest common aspect ratio on a phone (no idea what that is) to a perfectly square window. Currently, even on my not-quite-square iPad there are multiple display problems across the entire game. Honestly, this stuff should be easy for any competent GUI designer, these days. But you’re just not getting it. But that’s a whole other thread.
I’m going to add a mock-up to this post (if I can), but for now, I’ll just try to describe things in words.
So far, we have : the Victory graphic and battle name at top-centre; space for four “critical rewards” immediately below, in the centre panel (yes, it must be at least four – as per the Vault); standard rewards down the left and right sides, to the bottom of the centre panel; a reasonably-sized Continue button in the bottom-centre; a break-out box for special event scoring (possibly including World Event scoring – or anything else you can think of that might be useful to sometimes know), probably in the top-right or lower-left corner of the screen (needs experimentation); and finally, the “Battle Rewards List” for everything else, between the centre panel and the Continue button.
The stuff that always appears in the same places may look a bit much, at first, but players will quickly get used to it, and appreciate that it’s always in the same place. In other words, a lot of the initial, apparent chaos (if there is any) is quickly mitigated by consistency of placement.
Our goal with the Battle Rewards List (ie: rewards from the battle itself rather than particular troops or events, or other things, which do not already appear elsewhere) is to make everything visible on one screen. No scrolling left and right at all.
The easiest way is to allow it to wrap across two lines. In my PC window, I can see there isn’t quite enough vertical space for this currently. On my iPad, there’s heaps of vertical space you can use. On a phone, you will hopefully never need more than one line, once you break the other stuff out, because phone screens have much wider aspect ratios than PCs. On a tablet or in a square window (the extreme of testing), you definitely have space for two lines. On PC, you need to adjust the heights slightly, and possibly move the Continue button (not recommended).
There’s two reasons I think this is not an unreasonable request:
- We’ve already found a way to move a lot of items out of the Battle Rewards List. I’m not sure what the maximum number of items possible is at this point, but I reckon a phone screen can probably handle 90% of cases without scrolling.
- When you did the redesign for the current version of the Victory screen, you made some arbitrary choices about the vertical size of various elements, based on what you were trying to fit on-screen. Some of those arbitrary choices now need to be tweaked to optimise the new layout, in order to meet our goal of having everything visible on a single screen.
At first glance, I reckon shrink both the central panel (after all, it needs to fit 4 items now, rather than the 2-3 currently possible), the vertical space above the Continue button and the Battle Rewards List bar itself. Perhaps also the Victory graphic. I really wish I could think of a better place for the battle title, but I think it needs to stay where it is – note that for very long battle names, you probably need to compress the font horizontally so it doesn’t extend past the Victory graphic into the new Gold/Souls/Trophies/etc side panels.
Please pass on and acknowledge.
It may not be very humble to say so, but I think I’ve done a pretty good job of pointing out the problems with the new Victory Screen and suggesting specific changes. Maybe it’s not “pure Gold”, but I reckon it at least qualifies as “sterling Silver.” So please pass this on to the people who need to see it. Otherwise, I’ve just wasted my time (as I clearly did with the post linked above).
I know I’ve missed some stuff and probably got a few things a bit wrong. But I am a trained Engineer with genius-level intelligence, an ADHD-induced talent for seeing more possibilities than most, and an interest and likely-talent for graphical and text layout. Even if I can’t draw to save myself.
If you implement all of the above (with appropriate tweaks), I reckon you’ll get a cheer from the community. Please try that science experiment.
