gui UI/UX Feedback

[smartyMARTY]

I am looking for some feedback for my UI (images attached). The game was a text adventure - but has now gone towards the way of point and click. I have it laid out with a full screen background that is contextual to where you are in the game world. Then on the left side is your UI. On the right I have the game text appear in a window that ends just before the UI menu. There are three main portions:

 

Status (middle), Core Actions (top), and Contextual Categories (bottom)

 

Here are in game screen shots for the item UI. It has a popover for item details.

 

Here is the default screen when adventuring:

 

This is the shop screen when in a town:

 

And some other various in game shots:

 

 

 

I was wondering if this UI looked good, because there may be another option for me. I was hoping to get some feedback. All images are attached so if you would like to mark them up - that would be great!

 

If you want to try it out for the UX portion of feedback, you can use the test server found at: https://adventuregamequest.azurewebsites.net

 

Thank you!

[mattstyles]

Very neat and tidy, functional. There were a few buttons that did nothing, i.e. 'Can not explore now', 'Not in combat now', there could be a case to add an invalid or disabled state to these when they do nothing but, by and large I was never confused or surprised by the functionality which is a good thing.

I'd be very tempted to clamp to a maximum width though, with large screens the text gets quite strung out, the CPL (characters per line) gets high which hampers readability, which is absolute key. On that, I found it hard to work out what was new text and what was old, maybe the old stuff should have a disabled state of some sort so that I can quickly read the new text as it appears.

Be really careful with those background images, some of them made the text very hard to read, and as its primarily a text game readability needs to be top priority over everything else.

There's a little weighting issue, the health of your character is a key element, in combat you'll look at it frequently, but, at present the weighting of the menu overshadows it i.e. I had to go searching for it. Strength & Toughness also has equal weight to Health, Stamina & Mana, which doesn't seem right to me either. HSM is really important, particularly during combat, player characters probably less so.

There's little differentiation between action and updating the menu, possibly that will come via colour but should still exist in lo-fi as well. The Map, Chat & Item options update the menu, whereas the buttons and below usually initiate an action. Would be a case for tidying that up so that actions that influence the world are grouped logically and visual options for the menu are grouped somewhere else and differentiated somehow.

[smartyMARTY]

Thank you so much for the in-depth and professional feedback. It is much appreciated! I will be taking a lot of tips from this on the next UI Refactor. I never considered the weighting issue, but now that you pointed it out I will definitely investigate on how to apply those fields better. Again, thank you so much for the feedback