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New campaign designs
🕑 Added 2021-02-07 00:45:24 +0000 UTCHi everyone,
Campaign sharing is still progressing, but I needed something of a palette cleanser after wrestling the database migration for several weeks. After taking a quick detour to get the "A Light in the Fog" scenario out for the supposed release day, my designer Sarnetsky and I spent some time re-thinking the campaign overview page a bit -- which had yet to receive the real design treatment.
Key things we wanted to accomplish here:
- Keep the focus on the current scenario -- both from a usability POV (click the largest button to start playing) and to stay in keeping with the idea of fear of the unknown, we wanted to rethink the way interludes and scenarios were presented a bit.
- Getting over the tabs thing -- never my favorite visual pattern, it was sort of a means to an end to support the data on the campaign screen. At the moment there's a chance we still keep tabs for Dream-Eaters (dual campaigns seems like an okay place to still do this), but we've managed to convert all the other scenarios into a single tab view -- while still making sure that the important stuff is not buried deeper in the UI.
- Pulling more contextual information onto investigators -- in addition to showing your trauma and experience more compactly and visually, I've also pulled in story assets and supplies here. To accomplish this, we made the investigators collapsable -- which lets the content sit just a quick tap away, without taking up a lot of extra space. The attached video demonstrates this.
- Better support for custom content -- I've been recently playing through the excellent fan made Dark Matter campaign with my group, which means I've wanted to show some more love to the support for 'Custom' campaigns. Expect more work on this front in the future, but at the very least those screens have all had a UI/usability refresh -- including with the new dialog treatments throughout.
There's still some work to be done pushing pixels and getting all the translations sorted, but expect to see this rolling out sometime this week.
Now with the UI ready to support it and the technical debt paid down behind the scenes, the next big feature is campaign syncing.
Comments
Coldtoes
Sorry for the slow reply — work was trying to kill me this week. So when I first saw your comment I went to the app and still couldn't figure it out. But then today I found it accidentally and was able to view the resolutions for my past scenarios, yay! My suggestion would be to put prev/next-type arrows (when applicable) on that scenario bar, so people can see that they can swipe through them. Thanks again for your hard work and this great new design!
So there are two possible screens you might see campaigns on. Assuming you are using the feature where the app controls setup + resolutions, you should be able to swipe to the left to see the previous scenarios. I'll see about putting a view all button of some sort to show them in a list form, since right now there is a fair amount of swiping in + out, so it might not be quite as easy as before. If you were using the old campaign system (which doesn't have setup instructions), there is a 'Scenarios' button which lets you see + edit the past results. Let me know if that's not clear, and I can send some screenshots.
Coldtoes
I love the changes we've seen so far! Looks great. One question — previously I was able to go back and review earlier scenarios (I like to write down all my resolutions on my paper campaign log but sometimes I forget to do this and have to do it retroactively.) Today I finished my TCU blind run was not able to see any of the previous scenarios. I don't know if this is a design change, or if this was always the case at the end of a campagin (but I don't think so), or if it only happens when all investigators killed and insane (although I tried adding a sane, living investigator to see if that changed anything and it didn't seem to.) One of my favorite things about this app is that it saves me from unintentionally spoiling resolutions and decision paths I haven't seen yet, which is easy to do with looking at the scenario sheet. So I'd love the ability to go back and see previous scenarios even after the end of the campaign (for instance, to see what choices I made last time so I can pick different ones). Thanks again for all your work on this great app!
Jayelbird was quick to point out that being able to see all the trauma without having to expand them would be really nice -- which is of course a great idea that I totally missed. We'll work this into the collapsed state so you don't have to hunt for that trauma during scenario setup.
Yes! I definitely have been wanting to put some of the art into the scenarios for a while now -- I just didn't have a website to host it at until now. This is definitely something I plan to do once the basic collaboration stuff out the door. I'll probably setup a poll with a few broad features and let everyone vote on which one comes next.
Wow this looks so great! Thanks for the hard work. I don’t know if it will ever be a possibility(or even legal) but it would be really cool if the art from the scenarios could be in the app as well. Adds some cool atmosphere.
