Hello everyone! It’s time for our quarterly update, but before I dive into what’s new (and there’s a lot), I wanted to do a bit of housekeeping:
- These blogs going forward will be increased to every 4 weeks since we now have a lot more cool stuff to share!
- We will be updating our demo soon, be on the lookout for details!
First, we have expanded our team! We have added Josh Atkinson as a UX/UI designer full-time. Josh hails from down under and has been invaluable in updating our ‘look and feel’ of the game. You will see his influence in the accompanying screenshots. Welcome Josh!
ICYMI: Because of the new hires and all of the improvements we’ve made this year, we also just want to reiterate that our release window is now 2024.
User Experience improvements
Next, I wanted to talk about our User Experience (UX). As most of you know who have been following the game for a while, the Discoverability and UX has by far been our largest challenge. Alliance has a lot of options available to the player, as well as a lot of data. Our challenge is finding a way to make these options easy to understand and access, as well as present data in a way that makes it easy for the player to find what they need without overwhelming them with a wall of numbers and/or text.
Finally, after years of iteration, we feel that we have found the solution. The solution is actually in 5 parts:
- Right-clickable objects in the game that bring up a context menu to act upon
- A comprehensive, sortable, expandable outliner similar to other Grand Strategy Games that replaces a lot of our static data
- A unified popup window design that works like Windows: they are draggable, resizable, closeable and there can be multiple ones on screen at the same time
- An Action panel native to the main screen that works on System and Planet view that shows every action you can take with a system or planet, and if it’s not available, shows why not
- ‘Sticky’ tooltips that can be expanded with more information and data, to reduce the overall size of tooltips, as well as provide ‘tooltip within tooltip’ functionality
Let’s break these down in more detail. First, the right-clickable objects. Previously, when you wanted to do a Character Action, you had to open the Character Screen, go to the Actions Tab, and then select the Action category before you selected the Action that you wanted. While you can still do this, we have added the ability to right-click on a portrait anywhere in the game and a ‘quick action’ box will come up that allows you to immediately do certain things with that character, including firing them and performing an Action. You can also do this with Planets, Systems, Houses, Fleets, and your portrait.
Next: the Outliner. Currently, we have data spread out across the game in numerous screens, and it’s not a very unified setup - it’s shown more by mode (e.g. war, economy, domestic, etc) as opposed to holistically. So we wanted to find a way to present most of the info in the game, sortable, clickable, customizable, and by whatever value the player wants to use to compare objects. Enter the Outliner. The Outliner will be a powerful tool to access essentially anything that is actionable - essentially, anything that you can call up currently in the game to act upon will be available through the Outliner. This includes alerts, Court Requests, Comms, and turn blockers (e.g. setting the budget, etc). This means that we can remove several existing elements of the UI as well as remove several Nexii and streamline the amount of screens in the game.
As part of this design, we have moved to a singular modular window design that will carry across almost all of our UI windows. It’s designed to be movable, scalable, resizable, and closable, and multiple windows can be open at once without any performance loss. This has multiple benefits to the player - tons more flexibility for how they want to use the UI, the ability to compare objects (you can have multiple character screens/planet screens/system screens open at once) and the ability to carry data to other views (before, you could only see planet panels on the planet view, now you can see them anywhere).
Now, let’s talk about the Action Panel. This is the centerpiece of our focus on accessibility and player understanding. Imagine a panel that shows you EVERY SINGLE THING you can do with an object (system, planet, character, etc) that has headers that you can open and close, sort, and hide, and that gives you feedback why a specific thing isn’t available. This is the aim of the Action Panel. Now, finally, all actions that you can take with an object in Alliance will be shown in one place - not only the things you can do right now, but what you can potentially do in the future and what you need to do to make that available. In our testing, it has been a game-changer for access and understanding, and we’re excited to add it to the game!
Finally, tooltips have gotten an overhaul with functionality - they will now have the ability to be ‘sticky’ by pressing F once a tooltip is open, at which point you will be able to interact with it, either hovering over a keyword in the tooltip or opening up a info box that expands upon the info in a ‘quick text’ label. This should make tooltips both smaller (since they need to contain less info initially) and more functional.
This in addition to a revamped top Main UI that will be persistent across all screens except for End Turn - this way, you will have critical info available when an Event happens or you’re trying to decide to accept a Demand. To accommodate this, it has been made much slimmer and now stretches across the top of the screen.
System View
So that’s the UI. Now let’s talk about the System View! We have significantly revamped it and made it to where you can pan and zoom (similar to Stellaris). You can now zoom into a planet and as LOD increases see orbitals there, as well as 3D fleets stationed there(to be added very soon). You will also notice arrows pointing out towards LGN connections to other systems, as well as LGN nexus nodes, You will now be able to click on these arrows and move between systems (and nodes). We have also added zoom to cursor functionality, and we will be adding a zoom bar to show where you are in the zoom hierarchy.
We’ve done much more including an all-new Science Nexus design, adding more Actions and Epiphanies, balancing numerous facets of the game, adding the remainder of the Military System, and much more! We can’t wait to release the new demo that will showcase much of this new content, so you can judge for yourself!
Finally, our Discord has been quite quiet over the last several months, but it’s about to get a lot busier. If you’re already part of it, prepare for a significant uptick of activity very shortly, and if you’re not, what are you waiting for? Join the fun here: https://discord.gg/3hcGa4hcmE
See you soon!
Steve Hawkins
Project Lead, Alliance of the Sacred Suns