I have recently had the experience of watching as my friend
FadeTheCat, an experianced MMORPG gamer from the Windows and Macintosh
worlds, learned Battle For Wesnoth. She was kind enough to provide me
with running commentary on her impressions and reactions as she was
learning the interface, going through the tutorial, and playing Two
Brothers.
We took notes as she was learning. Her husband Rob (an expert programmer
and gamer) and my wife Cathy (a gamer who has tried BfW and decided she
didn't care for it) were watching during part of her learning process.
All four of us discussed her reactions and performance afterwards
and brainstormed on improvements her experience suggested for the
game. I found this immensely educational.
Fade's conclusion is that she quite likes BfW and would even like to
do campaign design for it. This is an offer to take seriously; she has
done game design for Steve Jackson Games and was in fact the author of
the rather successful Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls game. I
judge she has the potential to become an extremely effective BfW campaign
designer, offering a perspective and approach quite different from
those we have now.
But, of course, she sees bugs and problems.
Rather than presenting her observations in chronological order, I'm
going to group them roughly by estimated difficulty of execution and
topic. Some are just small UI teaks and help and tutorial changes,
but there are a few that will require considerably more effort. I have
rated them according to her reaction as Minor, Annoying, and Serious.
First, some easy ones related to the tutorial. Fade thought it
was quite good for its intended purpose of teaching basic game mechanics,
but had these issues:
1) It's too short. She'd like the tutorial to include more scenarios.
Bug: She wanted some practice on a wider selection of terrains, with more
different kinds of opponents, and with more advanced units. She
wanted to get this in a situation that was specifically *not* the
win-or-lose context of a campaign, so she'd feel more free to do
exploratory things that might be stupid.
Fix: More scenarios in the tutorial, with more unit types and terrains.
Fade commented that, ideally, the tutorial would have optional sections
on advanced topics so first-time users wouldn't be compelled to go
through all of them sequentially.
Rating: Annoying.
2) Transition to campaign play could be smoother
Bug: Fade didn't like the feeling of finishing the tutorial and being
dumped back to the campaign selector with little or no guidance on the
next step towards mastery. I explained that in trunk I had added
information about campaign difficulty levels and length to the
summaries. But she thinks there's another half of the cure.
Fix: Attach verbiage to the tutorial's end-of-game event recommending
some of the easier mainline campaigns as the next things to try. I've
already done this, though not yet committed it.
Rating: Minor.
3) Significance of the turn counter and time running out is not
emphasized enough in the tutorial.
Bug: This came as a surprise to Fade when she played TB. She pointed out
that, by contrast, the tutorial does a good job on the day/night cycle.
Fix: Explicit description of the round clock and the standard gold bonus
in the tutorial.
Rating: Minor.
4) Icons in the status line aren't explained well in the tutorial
Bug: (I had actually noticed this when I started playing, too.) The
status areas (turn clock/turns remaining, gold. villages, units,
income debits and credits, and the time clock) are not explained well
in the tutorial.
Fix: Add teacher dialogue explaining these.
Rating: Minor.
5) Tutorial should include an example of a loyal unit, and explain loyalty
Bug: Fade was not prepared to use the lotal units in TB well because
the tutorial hadn't broached the concept.
Fix: Add a loyal elf in part 2 of the tutorial.
Rating: Minor.
6) Tutorial should include a neutral keep.
Bug: Players don't learn from it that *any* keep tile can be
recruited around, and so may miss the significance of neutral
keeps in campaigns,
Fix: Add a neutral keep in the tutorial.
Rating: Minor.
7) Tutorial should at least touch on damage types.
Bug: None of the tutorial units have serious damage skew by weapon type.
A player going from the tutorial to, say, TB, has no warning of the
problem that piercing weapons are ineffective against Skeletons and she
should probably be recruiting Footpads instead of Horsemen and Spearmen.
Fix: Introduce and explain damage types in the tutorial.
Rating: Annoying
Next, some help-system and on-screen help issues.
8) Flavor text and mechanics should be distinguishable or separated in help.
Bug: Flavor text is nice but experienced players refreshing their knowledge
of the game often want to just pick out mechanics.
Fix: Organize like Civilopedia, where mechanics cones first and flavor
follows. Or, highlight the mechanics text so it's visually distinctive.
Rating: Annoying.
9) The right-click menu on terrain and villages should offer an option
to go to the help for that terrain., and 'd' should work there too.
Bug: Works for units, why not for terrain?
Fix: Obvious.
Rating: Annoying.
10) There should be a word-search function for the help
Bug: There's no easy way to find out (for example) what "Sunken Ruin"
in the terrain field of the status line really means, if anything. It
doesn't show up under terrains.
Fix: A word-search function in the help browser, like the
Civilopedia in the Civilization games.
Rating: Minor.
11) The mouseover texts for the top-line status areas are uninformative.
Bug: What kind of help is it when mousing over the flag icon displays
the name of the player leader? What is that supposed to mean? It's
unhelpful for the gold icon mouseover to just say "gold"; "Stored gold
available for recruiting units" would be better. Similar comments
apply to the other status panels. Why doesn't the "villages" icon
mouseover explain the meaning of both slash-separated numbers? Why
doesn't the "upkeep" icon mouseover explain why there are two numbers,
one in parens?
Fix: Improved mouseover texts that actually convey information.
Fade thinks we did a good job on the mouseovers in the right-hand
panel; why not here as well?
Rating: Annoying.
12) Visibility for unit types in help is too limited.
Bug: This is the first thing that got Fade really steamed. She
*hated* the you-can't-see-help-on-it-until-you've-encountered it rule,
because it keeps her from (a) making intelligent decisions about which
of her own units to concentrate on levelling up. and (b) making
intelligent decisions about which of her opponents' units must be
*kept* from leveling up.
Fix: Fade wants every unit in the advancement tree of a unit
encountered to be accessible in help. On IRC some objected that
this would injure the present RPG-like feel where discovering the
world is part of the fun. Mordante suggested a good compromise --
*next advances* of every encountered unit should always be
visible.
Rating: Serious.
13) "Press 't' to continue" is misleading
Bug: Fade thought this meant the game had effectively paused and
that the *only* way for her to go forward was to press 't'. She
didn't realize she could divert the unit or select other units.
Fix: Change message to "Press 't' to resume this movement."
Rating: Annoying.
Now for some more general issues:
14) Why is there a time-left panel at all in campaign mode?
Bug: Mostly it just encourages confusion with the turn clock.
Fix: Remove it. If it's supposed to be an indication that the player
can't move, the larger animated hourglass in midscreen is better.
(Sapient notes that removing the status-line hourglass from campaign
games has been on the EasyCoding page for a while.)
Rating: Annoying.
15) Where are the female leads in campaigns?
Bug: Way to ignore 51% of the population! Fade was kind of
steamed about this, too, and I can't really blame her.
Fix: Probably to get more women like Fade to write campaigns.
Rating: Serious.
16) Unit types topping out at level 2 makes them bad investments
Bug: I'd actually heard this one in my one previous extended conversation
wiith a Wesnoth newbie. Fade, when I explained the advancement tree while
she was complaining about bug 6, concurred. Why toss kills to a unit that
isn't going to advance to the power level of L3? And thus, why build it
at all?
Fix: L3 everything. Outlaws, ghosts, everything.
Rating: For her, Annoying. (I think it qualifies as Serious.)
17) The way names are handled is confusing.
Bug: Most characters have personal names. Some have only role names
("Supporter", "Villager", "Guardsman") that differ from their class
names. This leads new users to bark up wrong trees like this one
in TB, Fade asking: "How do I recruit another Villager?" when the
question she really wants is "How do I recruit another Spearman?"
(This will especially confuse newbies used to games like Starcraft
where only heroes and significant NPCs have names -- in Wesnoth, they
think they see a distinction that isn't there.)
Fix: Abolish role-based names. All units should have personal names.
I suppose we could have the roles back as "surnames", e.g. "Alwyn
Villager" or "Alwyn (Villager)".
Rating: Annoying.
Mac-specific glitches:
18) Mac installation is needlessly confusing
Bug: For the Mac installation, it should state clearly on the installation
panel that you really need all of those documents, and/or offer them as a
single draggable folder to go into Applications to begin with. The
current organization requiring several separate drag/drop operations
is pointlessly complicated.
Fix: Really, on the Mac, installation ought to be a simple
drag-to-folder operation.
Rating: Annoying.
19) Mac port can come up in a video mode that truncates the window
Bug: The Mac port can come up in a video mode that truncates the
window SDL window at the bottom. Fade had a real problem with this
because part of what's lost is the End Of Turn button.
Fix: Game should default to a video mode that fits the screen.
Rating: serious.
20) "Video mode" button is poorly placed and misnamed
Bug: It needs to be more obvious how to change the resolution to get the
end-of-turn button if it's hidden bu the above bug. Furthermore, "Video
Mode" is not an obvious label.
Fix: Change "Video Mode" to "Display Resolution".
Rating: Minor.
And finally:
21) The requirement to edit WML is a bug that will chase away designers
Bug: Fade was quite excited by the thought of hacking campaigns a
la Neverwinter Nights, but the prospect of hand-editing WML was
a crash landing for her. I told her about campgen, but then had
to admit that it's in a somewhat scratchy alpha state right now
Fix: Campgen must *work*, and should probably be merged into the
Wesnoth distro.
Rating: Serious.
Let me finish by urging the team to take this critique seriously and
put some priority time into address Fade's gripes. She is interesting
both as an articulate representative of a large class of gamers and
as an individual who could become an extremely -- even, at this time,
*uniquely* -- valuable addition to our stable of campaign designers.
Rather than immediately file 21 bugs, I've chosen to throw these to
the dev list because I think they pose us a challenge about our goals
and the game's future direction. Will we continue to be "by
developers, for developers", or will we strive for the next level of
artistic excellence by reaching users who don't think like us?
I know which I would choose...
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment
protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while
it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms.
If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it
remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth
century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787
and 1791 states such a thesis.
-- Stephen P. Halbrook, "That Every Man Be Armed", 1984
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