Frayed Knights - RPG Development & UI Work

The Rampant Coyote latest post this week talks about the development of his RPG game Frayed knights, and talks about how UI work is a hassle.

I think I’m on about my sixth iteration on Frayed Knights inventory screens. The first three were with the first game. I’m on system #3 for the sequel(s). At least this time it feels more “correct” to me, but there are still some quirks that just don’t “fit” well. For example – stacks of items. While everything else flows well, when the player chooses to move, sell, or buy an item from a stack, it necessitates another dialog to choose quantity.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t necessitate, but I don’t know a better way of handling it. I don’t think players would appreciate moving one item at a time from a stack.

I’m finding parts of the game design getting tweaked due to needs to streamline the UI. Maybe that’s putting the cart before the horse, but not necessarily. The whole thing needs to work together as a whole, and if something is just too complicated to do (as was the case too often in The Skull of S’makh-Daon), then it just doesn’t happen. As a guy who spends more time playing dice & paper RPGs in an average week than CRPGs (I tend to binge-play the CRPGs), this can be tough to swallow. I want to be able to do anything in games. As a programmer, from a mechanical standpoint, it’s not very hard to come up with abstract means of representing all kinds of conceivable actions. And the part of me that cut my gaming teeth on text adventures, I’m used to all kinds of outrageous possibilities being permissible (“Pour vial of holy water into demon’s bathtub”).

But in modern game design, it’s all about streamlining the verbs, and being more creative with a more limited problem space that can be conveniently represented by the UI. And – to paraphrase the quote attributed to Einstein, “UIs should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

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More information.

Hey Coyote, just curious, how is FK doing on Steam?

My launch direct actually did better than the Steam launch, TBH. Which is... weird. Maybe I set my expectations too low, and I don't push hard enough, but... that's how it goes. Anyway, I'm not gonna be quitting the day job anytime soon, but I'm not gonna complain about getting a few extra bucks each month. Helps pay for art.

How is Frayed Knights 2 coming along ?

UI is a major thing for me. UI is one of the top factors that helps me decide if I am going to be interested in game. As I get older, I start to lose tolerance for less effective UI's. I will look at screenshots/videos, read review opinions on the UI and play demos to get a feel for whether I would like a UI.

Scrav said:

UI is a major thing for me. UI is one of the top factors that helps me decide if I am going to be interested in game. As I get older, I start to lose tolerance for less effective UI's. I will look at screenshots/videos, read review opinions on the UI and play demos to get a feel for whether I would like a UI.

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To each his own. I am willing to put up with terrible UIs if I find a game enjoyable, especially if the game is turn based or pausable. This is not a critique, its just interesting to see what different game breakers are for different players.

Hoping you make oodles of money off the sequel, Coyote. And in so doing, enable yourself to quit the day job and lure Jon Van Caneghem away from EA!

Ok, well, some things are more likely than others.

I understand he'll want to keep his characters for a sequel but if it's feasible it would be nice to let the player choose the class of his choice for each of the set characters.

Heh - okay, lotsa bits:

#1 - Well, if Frayed Knights 2 was coming along as well as I'd planned, it'd be out by now. I'm very frustrated that it is not, but most of that frustration is on my own head, not on anybody else's. But… it's coming along. So there's that. It was enough that I felt comfortable spending hundreds of dollars to show it at Salt Lake Comic Con, but that was just a short level. My goal was to pack the experience into something someone could play in only five minutes. While successful, I also learned a lot.

#2 - UI was probably the #1 complaint about the first game, so I've been a little obsessive over it this time. I can't say it's going to be wonderful, but it will be significantly better than the first game.

#3 - Only a tiny fraction of players really took advantage of the amount of customization you could do in the first game to "evolve" the characters into different roles. I'm keeping it in this game for legacy purposes, and hey, I'm all about serving the niche, but it's not great. And from a storyline perspective… it just doesn't make sense to have Chloe start out as a warrior. Especially with FK2, where there's a lot more character backstory that's getting pulled in (and people from their past...). I'm dealing with so many story variations by what you choose to do in the game… multiplying them by all the different background choices / classes would be too much.

When this series is done, if I'm not totally sick of it, I'd love to do a spin-off game that's a more generic dungeon crawler set in the same world, with similar rules, but with totally player-created parties. Maybe even with procedurally-generated dungeons (all or in part). I'd love to play it, so of course I want to build it. But I gotta get these games out first.

At LEAST I should have a lot more of a rolling start with FK3.

Drithius - Boy, don't I wish. Being able to to do this full-time is still my end-goal, but I'm still a long way off from there.