Some Feedback about in-game Feedback and Clarity

SirColveskey

I wanted to make this post to point out a couple of issues I've been having over my games with clarity in the game design and UI.

Problem 1: It's difficult to tell when you've selected units, especially if you are moving quickly around the battle. The selector ring is very subtle and it takes effort to notice it.

Possible Solutions:
* Flash units upon selection. Flashing the units that are selected either a transparent white or yellow.
* Give units an aura on mouse/box over to indicate which units are about to be selected. (This could tie in with my critique on not being able to tell when you're selecting a seedling for the dependent abilities of the Alder class in my game-by-game thread.)
* Add a colored outline to units that you have selected matching your team color.
* Add a floating UI element with all selected units and a way to display their health (ties into problem 2)

Problem 2: It's difficult to tell a unit's HP in combat. I love the circular HP bars, but thy can be almost too subtle especially with a high concentration of units in one location.

Possible Solutions:
* Add HP bars to the unit panel in the bottom middle of the UI. While I'm not sure how to handle this for the tier one units, the Hero, and tier two and three units could easily have health bars over their unit portraits.
* Add floating unit portraits w/HP indicators of the selected units as indicated in Problem 1. Alternatively a selected unit UI could be added (Sim. every blizzard RTS ever)

Problem 3: It isn't clear when and where crystals will spawn. Crystals spawning is a massively important event, and can be used to direct combat flow; however, the arrival of new crystals is too subtle.

Possible Solutions:
* Verbose Solution: Add an announcer for crystal wave spawn with a countdown warning (similar to the minion spawning announcements in League)
* Subtle Solution: Add a countdown timer for the next wave of crystals spawning in the UI

As a related side note, it is also difficult to process the lifetime timers on crystals, and I have found myself on multiple occasions going for crystals right before they despawn.

Day9

Agreed on your problems #1 / #2. We recently shrunk the size of units slightly and these problems have cropped up. We definitely plan on iterating much more on these to improve'em.

As for problem #3, definitely not enough clarity on gems. I think if it were something ULTRA consistent like MOBA minions every 30s, that would be ok. But, the pattern is slightly wonkier w/ us and, as you suggest, it isn't listed anywhere. Will brainstorm some good solutions here. For now, this issue has been added to ze list .