Oh wow, well that's curious, certainly will be following this. Buuut...I agree that's it raw...like raaaaaw esp in ui department.
I think game would greatly benefit in style direction for UI. Stylized UI goes a long way for making the game feel polished. For example: the plan for the day looks like a page from a journal, the backdrop should be...something, preferably not void. Every meter should have different color to mean diffrent thing, cause color is a language on its own. Similar information is together. Meters start from the same side(right to left preferably. The meters themselves rounded and extra fluff added to be nice to look at. There's extra icons for meters be that mini-things related to stats, or characters face/related items or something to that extent, that relays information without having to read the words on the meter. The choice of actioncan be a drop-right menu with extra information poping up to the side. Your own character avatar, if it's important, can be put somewhere, preferably upper corner. Text window in cutscenes should not literally be a white windod with dialogue, but maybe a slowly phasing in lines of dialogue on a, as alrady metioned, stylized backdrop, alternatively just drop the window part or make it stylized to fit.
I think a lot can be mended with menus and tabs and sidebars. Information doesn't need to be displayed all at once like a bukakke for dear player to receive. Also when I say style I mean...a lot of things, it doesn't literally have to be "all the things, all hand drawn or game bad" I've screshot the examples of the games of same genre that I think executed UI nicely or excelently.The game certainly has unique to dev vibes and maybe simplistic design, that CS received can be done here too. To that extent this game would suit the UI style of games like Degrees of lewdity or Course of temptation. But because the game is based around a string of menues I think the UI architecture can be taken from Jack-o-nine tails(I couldn't find main house menu, only outside and girl stats tab). Still, choosing direction should be important to consider, be that school vibes, magic heroine vibes, fantasy/sci-fi, light/dark, serious/casual, simple/complex, highly made to fit style/generic for the sake of clearness. Also I think looking at diffrent fonts for main body of text can be an option.
Maybe passing buttons can be moved to the right corner, leaving the content in the middle, wrapping around it. The time and date made smaller, and not so bold, maybe even put into some dropdown tab, like degrees of lewd, where pretty much all the sidebar with info can be hidden. Whatever you choose in the end, I hope my UI rant was at least informative.
Thank you for the feedback! While designing the UI, I was very much thinking about idle games like Trimps and Groundhog Life, and the way that they devote a lot of screen space to letting you watch your progress bars go up. But because Cultivation Spiral is turn-based and has a lot more things you'll want to regularly change, it probably does make sense for the controls to take up a larger portion of the UI.
Genuinely I'd like an upgrade that just starts us with 2 vitality and 2 focus to accelerate out of the otherwise incredibly static first 10-15 days of the loop.
The very next planned upgrade is going to be all about mixing up the early part of the loop.
My current run where I got to Tanaka I take the flight on Day 95 :painpeko:
Ah well, time to do another run.
EDIT: In the case that it's too late for you to return to college town though, is there a way to force a restart into another loop? As it is I seem to be stuck unable to get the Saviour Meaning of Life
EDIT2: Alright nevermind, I managed to shave off a day and fly back to the college town just in time to die.
I'm sure you wouldn't take long to find this on your own, but just to make sure it's out there: Even though the Metropolis doesn't really have any content of its own right now, it does have its own date for the loop reset. In general, as you progress through each chapter, the loops will get longer and longer.
Here are some annoyances that I have with the interface:
- Most often, I'd like to keep most activities the same while changing only one or two when I notice a problem or have something new unlocked. Currently this means I have to go through each activity in the day and confirm each other selection, which seems unnecessary.
I'll make sure to include a dedicated button for just moving to the next day when I rework the UI.
- The only way to view progress on a goal is by clicking on that action.
This is something that's definitely going to be improved by the next chapter release, since that one will be introducing a mechanic that'll make it pretty much mandatory to be able to see an overview of multiple goals.
- Selection boxes for each daily activity, enabling direct selection of activities where a change is desired rather than having to input choices into every time slot. This can be part of the "Actions" overlay, integrated into the display.
So, something like "Click a timeslot, and it brings up a clickable list of all possible actions for that timeslot you could choose today?" I think I could do something like that.
- Maybe also a screen that shows the specific actions that raise a particular stat or relationship?
Some sort of action glossary could be doable too.
Here's an overview of a (complete, polished) game that accomplishes many of the same things you're doing:
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This also seems like a reasonable improvement.
Other potential Auto >>> settings:
Repeat actions until stamina is full/empty
Repeat actions until the next goal is accomplished
Ideally you want something that's accessible to both. The primary actions that players take are deciding what goes where in the schedule--so every place they see that schedule should be a place they can click to change what happens there. There's no reason to make players go to a different menu to select/change something that they can see on their screen. If I'm looking at the weekly schedule, I should be able to see that Tuesday's "Sleep In" won't restore stamina and be able to adjust that action right there without having to wait for it to be Tuesday or to go back to the Actions screen.
The problem there is that the game would need to "pre-play" itself multiple days in advance in order to know whether your Stamina will be full on a future day. It's definitely possible to code it to work that way, but it would introduce a lot of potential bugs, and it would mean that any performance issues caused by game calculations would become much worse. Seems like a risky feature to commit to.
The upgrades screen could use a lot of cleaning up currently.
View attachment 4413462
A lot more of this screen could be used to display the buttons that players can click on, rather than needing a soft autoscroll to reveal the rest of "Instinct" and the "Intelligence" button.
There are a lot more upgrades planned, so I didn't think too hard about trying to fit as many of them on the screen at once.
The tool tips at beginning of each day are useful...after a couple loops when you actually understand them. So maybe in the future an aside having all those tips may help greatly with the onboarding process.
It's embarrassing that I already included an external "tip list" file for my other game, but it didn't occur to me to do the same here. I'll make sure to fix that in the next release.
I do like the different reactions to your equipment and stance-etc between loops being highlighted. It really helps as you keep clicking through stuff.
Some of them were pretty fun to write. Have you tried using handheld games while picking a fight with Hashimoto?
The characters were pretty likeable and i deeply appreciate how CSDev went and made their genders customizable so they can appeal to all sides of the orientation spectrum of the players. While going through the days of the game i really wanted to find out what happened to Tanaka and get closer to the characters, they were all very interesting in design (Hashimoto is best boyfriend though, he's the cutest. Tanaka is a close second...maybe). I have yet to finish the game though, i really want to save Tanaka and see all the different content that i skipped through in order to optimize my points, it's a fun little system to play around.
I want to add some proper art assets for male love interests too, but it's hard to decide how they all should be adapted. Maybe male Yumeno can look pretty much the same, but what about Hashimoto? Should male Jackal have a beard? It's going to be a little while before I start devoting time to it, but I can't put it off forever.
- The tooltip for Charisma doesn't seem to update after purchasing Magnetism, or completing the popularity goals from Tanaka's friend group.
Thanks for catching this - I hadn't realized that the popularity goal bonus wasn't being reflected either.
- There's a lot of left over space in the action results menu. It'd be nice to view how those progress/experience/relationship numbers are calculated through a hover tooltip or through clicking to expand. Something like this maybe?
View attachment 4417679
(Putting Stamina in parentheses allows for a Stance to be added to the calculation there). It'll also make it much easier to find when/if something isn't calculating correctly.
I was concerned about devoting space to this in the action summary because of how it could overflow depending on flavor text and potential future mechanics that will need to be accounted for. Instead, I tried to provide this feature in the Simulator section of the Stats screen. Have you tried that out?
Posting some general feedback and Ideas that I have below:
Feedback on Events:
As this is an idle game, you're going to be replaying sections fairly often. Whenever you repeat an event, you have to go through the entire event again. It would be nice if instead of that and so long as there aren't any new bits of text to be seen, there was instead a summary that only takes up one or a few pages.
My current plan is to have the screens flip by much faster for scenes you've seen before, particularly the ones earlier in the loop. This is also going to require me to have the game be smarter about when it loads the assets, though, since I've noticed that it's causing noticeable slowdown when the game needlessly loads (for example) the same background over and over again instead of reusing what it already loaded.
Feedback on Menu UI:
The Buttons above the Actions Buttons should be their own buttons, rather than one that cycles.
View attachment 4422401
Or something like this to save space:
View attachment 4422404
My concern here was that the text would be too small. Would people really be alright with much smaller text there? Or maybe I could try using emojis or small custom images instead.
Feedback on Action planning:
When selecting which timeslot you want to edit, Pressing the timeslot names should bring you to its setting. If you decide to do this you could then make the "Set Action" button always the resolve day button.
View attachment 4422321
For more advanced action planning, the Planner page should be turned into a tool dedicated to editing the entire week. Other bits of the UI, such as the relationship bars and the attribute bars should either be shrunk or removed. to make room for other settings. As a way to integrate the "default action choice" setting into the game more, in the planner page you could add a "follow your planner" button and only use the planner when its activated.
View attachment 4422368
The Planner Page could function similarly to an excel spreadsheet. You click to select a timeslot, click the action that you want to set, then click on the days that you want to use it on.
View attachment 4422386
As I mentioned above, allowing selection of actions for future days is something that might be tough to implement. But the rest I can definitely see working. I've put it on my to-do list.
The Game in general is also fairly laggy for a text based game. Switching between actions to perform takes like half a second, so it would nice to see that improved.
I've been trying to track down what exactly is causing this. The feature to test your save causes the game to run through your entire history across all loops, and that only takes a few seconds, so I don't think it's the calculation of the game mechanics themselves. I'm thinking that it must be the process of drawing the UI on the screen.
Some gameplay/similar suggestions. Btw for the UI I completely agree with Hunterier.
Skills(Specifically something I like is something being able to specialize into certain things within skills. Maybe at every 5th level you get a bonus like choosing to boost the base effect or expanding it. For example maybe focuss second option could be something like for things where the goal is already completed/it never had one it boosts skill gain by half as much as it would with goals.)
more start withs(Mainly academics and waterworks)
Stamina discount(like maybe for each purchase of the upgrade you get 0.05% stamina usage decrease)
Other resetting bonuses(too lazy to add like 2 more lol. Time multiplier, essentially gives you extra days before the major events and Skip Intro, skip the first like day and get to select what you want to select till you have everything lol.)
Traits(Something else I like in in games like this is traits. They could effect skill gain and even give you certain skills early.)
There are many, many extra bonuses planned, some of which are specifically geared around making the early part of the game go faster. Of course, more suggestions and ideas are always welcome.
