Overland Newsletter — January 2017
First, a couple of quick Finji things, and then we can dig into what we’ve been doing with Overland since the last newsletter.
The biggest thing going on at Finji right now is this little game called Night in the Woods. You might have seen it mentioned Teen Vogue, The Guardian, Wired, Time, Game Informer, IGN, or PC Gamer as one of the games to keep an eye on this year. We’re biased (slightly) but tend to agree. It’s pretty pretty pretty special. And it’s basically done, we’re just all pulling some late nights to get all the last little bits and pieces before it releases on Feb 21. So that’s keeping us busy.
Also, if you’re a NITW backer, you got a message earlier today about the Finji stretch goal inside of Night in the Woods. It’s a real-time hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler with random levels called DEMONTOWER, inspired by our love of Dark Souls, Bayonetta, and other hardcore games. We hope that you A) find it, and B) enjoy it. It’s fast and tough, and even has some secrets. There’s a few hours of action game in there. We haven’t checked to see if this is officially the most overwrought stretch goal in Kickstarter history yet, but we think it comes close at least. In the running, as they say.
Anyways, there’s that stuff. Staying busy as always! Now let’s talk about the game that you actually came here to read about.
Humble Brags: Actually Regular Brags
This was a fun month for Overland. We got write-ups in The Guardian and on Red Bull’s gaming website (wait what), and Lewis & Simon from Yogs did a one-shot for their channel and seemed to have a lot of fun. It was cool to see strangers having the kinds of experience we have been hoping people would have while playing.
Ok let’s talk about game design!!
How to User Interface: A Design Story
When we first started prototyping Overland and thinking about where it could go and what it might be like, all our planning was in primarily two camps: gameplay, and vibe. What sorts of things should you be able to do, and what should those things look like, and sound like, and feel like? Sometimes we call this top-down or bottom-up or middle-out design or something, depending on if you’re stressing mechanics first or look first or whatever, but for us it’s always this very scattered, loopy, iterative process.
Maybe you can do THIS action, which could look like this? But that will change the vibe. Do we like this new vibe? Is it better than the old vibe? If we DID do this new vibe, then that would open up this other action we hadn’t thought about before, that might be interesting… and so on.
Throughout all of this was a little voice off to the side going “yea but how. Like what buttons will people push? What are you doing” but thankfully it was a small voice so we just ignored it for like a year.
That was the voice of USER INTERFACE DESIGN though. And to be honest one reason we weren’t listening to it much is Adam (hello) has a lot of background in UI design, in games and otherwise, and considers himself a student of UI/UX, as pretentious as that sounds. It’s a super important part of making any kind of software, this weird floating psychic layer between the thing and the person doing the thing. So yea we are making a strategy game, and yea that usually has a lot of built-in UI challenges, but, well, we are quite good at the UI so it should be fine?
Ha ha ha
ha
Where we do we even begin. Ok the first problem is this: everything in a game is UI. All of it. The level design, the controls, the animations, the HUD, ALLLL OF IT. Is UI. All of this stuff is connected to the loop of players giving and taking from this weird piece of software you made for some reason. We sort of knew this coming in but also had mainly worked on games that were quite small and so the explicit or non-diegetic (non-game-world) UI elements were quite limited.
And we’d made some decisions early on that we knew were strong in different ways that would help us with the UI later. Keeping inventory limited and visible was a huge part of this, even though it presented other production challenges. Keeping stats limited to a couple of character traits here and there was another part of that. I guess we figured between that and Adam’s extensive expertise and experience (lol) maybe we’d be ok.
That was almost two years ago.
We’ve been working on Overland’s UI for almost two years.
Ok that’s kind of a loaded statement. As you know we’ve been working on a lot of other things too — new environments, new inventory items, that uh Night in the Woods game, and so on. But two years?? On BUTTONS?? ARE YOU SERIOUS
And like, yea, yea I guess we are. Part of that is we’ve “solved” the UI several times now. Maybe five-ish times we’ve been against the wall and quite flustered and suddenly seen a great way to bring out all the important information and present it to the player in a reasonable way that balances information with obscurity, availability with clutter, focused central elements with secondary and tertiary screen edge elements, and so on. Five completely different ways of accomplishing this based on wherever the game was currently at.
But then more stuff gets put into the game. Maybe some new animations, and the new animations help us realize there’s a new set of actions that would make X, Y, and Z a lot more fun to do, and now suddenly our simple UI solution is getting strained by the game itself, and we’re at a crossroads:
Do we overhaul the UI again, or start chopping off game functionality, or both?
Well, the answer is yes. Both. Neither. Or one of them. It completely depends — usually there’s a few nights of sleeping on it and a team hangout as we discuss how long will the next overhaul take, and are these new gameplay things cool enough to support, and you know we could do this other thing with the buttons if we just stopped supporting this mechanic, which is fine except that mechanic is TOTALLY AWESOME and no YOU’RE WRONG and
I’m not sure how much there is to say about the actual UI overhauls themselves, weirdly. Usually it’s just realizing “oh we can just do this, nice” and then doing it. Oh hey we don’t have to show everything all the time, we could put a little outline and then do a mouseover thing, nice (once, of course, the game supported outlines) and so on. There have been a bunch of places though where we’ve had to toss out whole mechanics or player actions because they were just hurting more than they were helping, and I wanted to talk about each of those real quick.
Throwing
If you’ve been playing Overland or watching videos, you may have seen the occasional survivor throwing a bottle at an enemy, or throwing a rock at a exploding thing, or whatever. For a while, back in… ye olden times, anyways, throwing was a generic action that you could do with any item.
This produced some EXTREMELY AWESOME scenarios. Jeff might stab a creature in the face, then literally throw his knife over a car to Melissa so she could stab a different creature on the other side. It was siiiiick.
So we threw it… in the GARBAGE.
The problem was this — when every item can be thrown, well, every item can be thrown. You’ve just doubled the possibility space players have to cope with every turn, bought yourself an extra UI button for every item and action to actually trigger the throw. It’s even worse than that — if you start trying to min-max your action points, you have to start counting up all the player inventories anywhere within throwing reach of the current survivor in order to even make a guess at what items they might have access to in order to do their turn. I mean emergent complexity can be a good thing but *dramatic music* at what cost?
And if we’re going to dump that responsibility on the player then that means all that information has to be foregrounded in the UI or else we look like JERKS and oh man what a mess. What a mess. So yea, we tossed it out. And who knows? We’ve dumped ideas before only to have them suddenly reappear later, when we had some other cool thing implemented, and suddenly they work and click and we’re a happy family again.
Swapping
For a lot of the first public showings of Overland, back when there was no diagonal movement yet, we had a thing where if you were adjacent to another survivor you could switch spots with them. This was superb for a bunch of reasons — fantasy of teamwork, weird Sudoku-like puzzle possibilities, cool animation possibilities, some nice chances to trigger contextual character speech to add texture, and so on.
But like throwing, when swapping is always on the table, you kind of have this extra button everywhere all the time. If you’re mousing over a neighboring survivor, we don’t really have a built-in way to differentiate if you are trying to select them or switch spots with them. And if every time you mouse over a player you’re getting hit with a “Oh hey I couldn’t but help notice that you are mousing over a player. PERHAPS YOU WOULD LIKE TO SWITCH SPOTS WITH THEM? IDK JUST ASKING”
It was such a drag, and it was kind of just built-in to the mechanic itself. We begrudgingly removed it just to get a little UI clarity back, and it was worth it. Barely, to be fair, but still definitely worth it. Then, a few months later, we added diagonal player movement though and got back a lot of the nice movement complexity for your group without all the disastrous UI issues. And we lived happily ever after.
Tokens
Ahahaha tokens. I am not gonna lie I was very, very happy to see tokens die. Their death is fresh, so fresh I can taste it, and it’s so delicious.
Om nom nom.
Ok so starting a while back, I want to say as early as maybe … July 2015, maybe earlier, we were staring at a bunch of bad UI issues, almost all of them revolving around vehicles.
Vehicles, oh lord. Don’t put cars in your game. Just don’t. So the thing with vehicles is this: you can’t see anything inside of them. At least in Overland you can’t. And if you want to see inside of them well that’s a whole other production talk about how to do that and how that will work and so on. At some point we decided you know what, that fight isn’t worth it. We’ll just use the UI to show what’s going on there and that should be fine. That was the right call, so far so good.
Thus was born the first version of the “vehicle panel”, a sort of floating slotted UI element that helped show you who’s in the car and crucially what items they have. Which in and of itself was I think basically the right call. You can bundle together the survivor profile pictures, inventory slots, vehicle’s fuel amounts, and so on. And hey if everybody’s there together in the car maybe they can swap their gear around, why not?
Yes, why not. Why not.
Why not.
Ok I will tell you why not. Because the whole reason we started making this game in the way that we did in the whole effing first place was we wanted to make un-Diablo in some ways. You have a stick? Great. Your inventory is a stick. End of story. This is a road trip game about survival, not a backpack-space management game (not that that’s anything wrong with that, lookin at you RE4 you handsome devil).
So anyways we made it so you can swap their gear around in the car.
And you could swap their gear into their trunk, which made less sense but whatever. So to enable that we set up these drag and drop tokens, board game style, that had little icons on them and drop shadows and the whole thing. We put little icons into the inventory slots so you could see if it was a backpack or a luggage rack, then we added like little pips to show uses or fragility to the items that needed them, and so on. And then just left them in for like a year or two because, well, why not.
So the thing is, is that as hateful as these little effers were, they solved almost every item-related and vehicle-item-related problem we had. They were easy to understand, and they had better drag-drop visual affordance than even the replacement system that’s in First Access currently (Heather has some ideas how to fix that but). They totally got the job done, even though they produced probably half our bug reports all by themselves, and just sucked to look at, as a person.
So how were we able to get rid of them without ruining everything?
The Roster
Overland has had at least three completely separate squad roster UI modules over the years. The first two were basically the same though: some little icons that show the survivor portraits, and maybe some other relevant info. Like you do. We always smashed these and left them in a dumpster somewhere though because they always had the same dumb size issue. If we made the roster big enough to be readily useful, then you were A) duplicating a lot of the player profile window, and B) using up too much screen space as your party grew.
This fall though Heather figured out the roster look and feel you see in the recent First Access builds, where your party is in a nice group standing together in one image. The goal here was just to give you a nice cohesive sense of who your squad was, and it works quite well.
The thing that we didn’t plan on though is setting all that up down there also gives you a great preview of your squad’s inventory items. Because we spent like a year building up this limited and visual inventory system, you could now see all your characters and all their items. Even if they were in a vehicle.
Do you see where we’re going with this?
It was a beautiful day. Like we do with all sweeping changes we just went through and disabled a bunch of stuff and played a few rounds to see if it would fly and oh man did it ever fly. The roster 100% completely compensates for the lack of item visibility in the vehicle panel UI. We were able to completely de-clutter the focused areas of the UI basically for free.
We showed token-less Overland down at PAX South last weekend and it was as if the tokens had never even been there.
~ victory music ~
(victory music literally did come on in iTunes at this part)
The only real catch is that we lost the ability for players to swap gear between in-vehicle characters. And there is a cost to that, there’s a bit of lost flexibility and so on. However, as that was a largely hidden thing in the first place, and because we added the ability to trade items while not in a car, we felt it was an acceptable loss.
What’s Next
Woof ok, thanks for reading! Believe it or not this is just a very small slice of the process we’ve gone through to produce the UI that we have. I … it’s been a long couple of years haha. This writeup doesn’t include clown cars, item duplicating, feral GTA, and so on.
Getting the UI right is such a crucial part of the experience though, and especially so for first-time players or players new to the genre. We wanted to make something that board gamers could pick up and play, and I think we’re getting close to hitting that mark, which is exciting for this kind of turn-based strategy or tactics game. It’s not a super common thing.
We should note here that despite Adam’s “experience” and “expertise” the UI has been a highly collaborative effort. On account of Adam having no idea what he’s doing, we mean. Art director Heather Penn’s input and designs are a crucial force on what we’ve produced. Thanks also to our in-person players at shows for inadvertently helping us very much, and to our First Access community.
I feel like we also need a disclaimer here that this isn’t necessarily an assertion that we’ve done the UI right, or done the best job, or invented some clever thing, more than … at the very least, we’ve been willing and able to trash the parts that weren’t working, and I am proud of us for that.
Anyways, we’re hard at work on a bunch of new urban environments that we’re going to introduce to First Access this month, and also working on beefing up the variety of encounters you can have as a player. These are features we’ve been looking forward to implementing since… well since we started working on the UI, actually. So it should be an exciting few months as we finally get to work on the guts of the game some more, and worry a little less about which button goes where and why.
I hope you’re looking forward to this stuff as much as I am. Normally I’d put a ton of boilerplate at the bottom here about where to follow us on the social medias and whatever but like… that’s probably how you got here? So you’re probably fine?
I guess if you want to follow dev more closely you can always keep an eye on our twitter account. Let’s leave it at that. Thanks again for reading, and we’ll see you at PAX East or whatever other thing we’re at next! In the meantime, look out for awesome new features and weird new places to visit, coming very, very soon.
