Minimizing UI Friction in Turn Based Tactics Games #
One-click actions #
Games like XCOM, Fire Emblem, Warhammer 40k Mechanicus, Gloomhaven Digital etc. sometimes have a problem with requiring many clicks/actions from the player to execute actions. To minimize this, you could have the player’s options for what a character should do on a tile appear as a button on that tile. For multiple actions these buttons could be arranged in a grid.
For example, a character could move to an empty tile (just one option with one button). Or if they could cast an aoe ability on that tile then on hover that tile would have two buttons. Clicking one would automatically take that action.
When hovering an enemy, buttons would appear for each type of attack the character could do. For out of range enemies, a shadow movement could appear when hovering to make the attack possible with just one click!
Show Ability Effect On Hover #
Another common annoyance I run into in turn based games is how many individual checks I sometimes have to do when making a decision for a character’s action. For instance, if I want to find out which enemy I want to attack, I usually need to go through each possible enemy in range, start the attack process, review the damage/probability/other effect preview window, then remember that information so that I can compare it to every other possible action I have. This is sometimes really trivial (when there is a single enemy, for instance), but sometimes really involved to the point where I need to start double checking the preview windows as I forget what they contained.
One way to solve this is to show a small pop-up preview window on top of every possible target when hovering over a skill/attack/spell. This mock-up shows a simple example of a healing spell with only the amount healed shown. In practice, you would also want to show probability to hit, any effects the spell applies (e.g. poison), etc.
This example is overly simple and doesn’t fully show the usefulness of this feature. In a real game, the diversity of outcomes would be much greater most of the time.
Enemy abilities #
One extension of this feature is to make it so that when hovering over an enemy the same pop-up preview window would appear on all the squares it can target (even with moving). The window would contain that enemy’s current intent given the state of the game, which would change as you moved your characters around. This would make it easier to see what enemies are capable of, and would make it less likely that the player would get blindsided by something they didn’t think was possible, which is a bad experience especially if it leads to the player reloading the encounter.
Admittedly, this might be pretty hard to implement completely depending on the game’s rules. Even if this isn’t implemented, games that are wholly lacking any way to see what enemies can do (what effects their attacks will have on your characters) besides doing all the math yourself I find very tedious (see the turn-based modes for Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity 2).
Categories: Gamedev, Mechanic Ideas