Hello again folks! Another screen to show you today, this time during a villain turn. we're still in the realm of mock-ups at this point in terms of what we're showing off. While we actually have quite a bit implemented, it still has that "alpha" feel to it and we want to polish it some more before letting it out of the bag.
We'd love to hear what you think. more info here
This is delightful. I (mostly) can tell what's going on, and it looks very cinematic. Neat!
* Shakes with excitement *
Really liking the look.
Really liking the look, too!
Now, can I see everything I want to be able to see at a glance? Not quite.
I know this may be asking a lot, but I want to be able to see everything that I can see when I'm playing the game on a table. That includes things like what are both the maximum and current HP of a target and all of the cards in play (it looks like only two of a hero's cards can be shown). It also means being able to read the text of each card, though I'll admit that I can usually only do that by grabbing and reading the individual card, so something that allowed me to, for instance, touch a card to see its text might be sufficient.
Frankly, it's impossible to show everything that you can see on the table in a game of Sentinels on a tablet screen. On a 50" 4K TV, perhaps. We need to work within the capabilities we have. That means showing the most important information at a given time, while making it easy to see everything else you may need with as few interactions as possible.
On the screen posted here, you can scroll through the hero & environment cards horizontally, and/or bring up the "thought bubble" view as seen in the previous post. And just as before you can bring up the full text of any card quickly.
However, as mentioned in the past, we are planning to include another screen (the "overview") that attempts to show as much information as possible. The overview can be activated at any time, and would show at least the title & HP of all cards in play. Now you can imagine what can happen in a game of Sentinels and think about whether that screen could include artwork & text.. the other day we played Matriarch and she had every single fowl in play.
I wonder if it would be helpful to have hero, villain, and environment views that only showed those play areas, and then an overview view that showed HP totals and number of cards in play across all the play areas. Maybe the titles of the cards could be shown, too. For each individual play area, maybe there'd be enough room to show the text of at least some of the cards? Not sure about that.
I'm envisioning that on my turn if I need to see other play areas, I would switch to those views as needed and then back to my play area in order to play, use power, draw, discard, etc.
With these individual views, I can envision that if one is playing alone, one would see the buttons/functionality for taking actions for each play area, but if one is playing with other people, then one might still be able to see their play areas, but wouldn't be able to take actions in them.
I'm envisioning a startup screen, like Artemis has, where one chooses which ship one is on and then chooses a set of stations to be available when playing. Some of the stations can only be chosen by one person (like a hero's play area), but some could be controlled by multiple people (like the villain or environment play areas).
Artemis achieves this in part by having one of the connected computers be the place where games are started. I imagine you wouldn't want to have to have a dedicated central computer for this, though.