Flight of the Amazon Queen GUI

[abstauber]

Did that GUI worked for you?


Right now I'm standing at a crossroads with my game. I like the MI2 GUI a lot and I've already started to draw backgrounds at 320x142. On the other hand, designing puzzles were you have to e.g. push
objects rather than simply use them might come out a little unfair. (like in DOTT, Hoagie had to push the bed in order mess it up, getting the soap and so on...)

So I'm now thinking to reduce the Scumm GUI to something and stumbled upon Flight of the Amazon Queen. What do you think? Using MI2 and try to avoid push pull or using a simplified one like Flight of the Amazon Queen?

[Mazoliin]

Well, the FOTAQ's GUI is quite identical to the MI2 except that push & pull have been replaced with move, so in my mind it doesn't really matter.

If you're planning on avoiding push/pull if you use the MI2, then you wont have any need for a move command either, hence remove those verbs completely and stick with the one you're going to use.

And while you are removing verbs, have another think about open/close too.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I've never played Flight of the Amazon Queen before and these look rather confusing at a first glance.

-Open and close are pretty obvious.
-The up and down arrow I originally thought it was push and pull until I noticed the hand to hand icon after it.  Which 'almost' has that push and pull look to it.  No idea what both of those icons are.
-Magnifying glass is obvious also.
-Downward hand with arrow pointing upward is drawn wrong if it is supposed to be Pickup.  The hand should look like it's going to grasp something.
-The speech bubble doesn't need a question mark inside.  At first I thought this was 'game help' and the icon with the wrench was 'game settings'.
-Not a clue what the wrench in hand symbolizes unless there is an actual Repair verb.

I'm not a huge fan of these verb graphics.  If I were to make a game with graphical verbs, I'd probably make them animate when the mouse is over them. 
Like open and close (being one verb) would be a door.  When the mouse is over the door it quickly opens and then closes. 
Push and pull would be combined with perhaps a hand holding a rope and pulls itself off the verb icon and repeating.  And same for a hand pushing something.

I don't know.  Animations would be better, but aren't necessary.  They just need to be drawn better than these.
Or I'm just crazy.

[Snarky]

If I remember the game correctly, the up-down arrows represent "move" (push/pull), the two hands with arrow from one to the other is "give", and the wrench is "use" or "operate" (e.g. drive a car). Yeah, the UI sucks.

[kaputtnik]

There was this thread by Vince Twelve about superfluous GUI verbs: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=35142.0

I read through it, didn't agree with all of it, but my feeling is: Having played the demo and following your progress in the outdoor scene wip thread, I think that the graphics style of your game will be quite a homage to Monkey Island. Then, even if it is just for nostalgia's sake, why not use the old Monkey Island GUI?

If somebody comes up with a streamlined interface where interact is practically the only verb that is necessary, this can be cool, and it is most of the times, because puzzles are not artificially constructed around finding the right verbs.

But if you implement the Monkey Island 2 interface well (indicate to the via an action response player that "Use" is close but not enough, in that case), it can also be fun, and feel right.

[cat]

I hated this gui. I always mixed up the icons with the hands. I also hated the small inventory gui, combining inventory items is a pain in the ...

If you really want to use the gui because you like the verbs of it, at least use different colors for the verbs to make them easily distinguishable.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I'll admit I liked both the gui and the game, but I don't really get into a fit about gui design.  I will concede that it uses some redundant actions (open/close and move could all factor into to the wrench, for instance) but it never bothered me to click a specific icon for a specific action.  Amazon Queen didn't make too much use of open/close or move that I remember, which is a good argument for condensing them into the wrench icon.  Using an item on a person could just as easily substitute for give as well, and I can't remember if you could actually give items to people this way.

[jetxl]

I'll admit I liked both the gui and the game, but I don't really get into a fit about gui design.  I will concede that it uses some redundant actions (open/close and move could all factor into to the wrench, for instance) but it never bothered me to click a specific icon for a specific action.  Amazon Queen didn't make too much use of open/close or move that I remember, which is a good argument for condensing them into the wrench icon.  Using an item on a person could just as easily substitute for give as well, and I can't remember if you could actually give items to people this way.

Basicly all the verbs can be compressed into interact, look and walk, but the choice in verbs is the charm of games like MI and FotAQ. It's not really the goal here to make it as efficient as possible.
It's possible to sum up all the Lord of the Ring books into one word: walking. But that doesn't make it more or as interesting as the books.

[abstauber]

Basicly all the verbs can be compressed into interact, look and walk, but the choice in verbs is the charm of games like MI and FotAQ.

Exactly. I'm just looking for something to waste space on the screen So I'll stick to verbs and try to make use of the magic rightclick a lot. That should be fine with most players.

Thanks for the input!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

In my previous post I'm essentially saying the same thing you are, Jet, I'm just pointing out that the redundancy is something that bothers some players today (and gui purists like Vince!).  I do think that earlier lucasarts games made better use of the verbs available than later ones did.  In Maniac Mansion, for instance, just about every verb had multiple opportunities for use in the game (with the possible exception of Unlock, Read and Fix), while successive games made less and less use of the available verbs.

[OneDollar]

If its going to be obvious what verb you should use to complete a puzzle, and if extra verbs will add to the depth of the interactions and the game I'd say go for it. If you have one verb that only gives the default response except in one situation, or if the difficulty of your puzzles comes from trying to figure out whether you should push/pull/use etc an object then that's approaching bad game design and you'll make Vince Twelve cry.

in DOTT, Hoagie had to push the bed in order mess it up, getting the soap and so on...

This is a good example. The player's thought process should go something like this:
"I need to make the maid stay longer in this room"
"Maybe I could make more of a mess so she spends longer cleaning"
"Perhaps I can mess up the bed?"
If they then try to use the bed and nothing happens (because they should have pushed/pulled it) they might abandon that idea and get stuck. That's the sort of thing you want to avoid. In this case the same thing happens whether you push, pull or use the bed

[abstauber]

Yeah, this + annoying unavoidable mazes and I'll cry too

I do think that earlier lucasarts games made better use of the verbs available than later ones did. 

Last month I replayed ZakMcKracken again. I totally missed out that you weren't supposed to talk in the older Lucasarts games. Apart from that, the GUI worked for me. Only the deads ends were annoying as always.

[Dualnames]

I don't really think that using Amazon queen GUI is better than MI2. Still, it's not that bad as a GUI overall.

[Radiant]

The main problem with that GUI is that it uses up too much real estate.

[TerranRich]

GUIs that complex should use words instead of icons, like MI did. It was just a clumsy and confusing interface.

[jetxl]

FotAQ did. See that black space between the background and GUI? It's for the command text.
I remember that it was translated to spanish and french too. This way the game didn't have to change graphics.

[Dualnames]

I just wanted to say, that if you implement any type of this GUI either the Amazon or MI you should definetely make it user friendly, that means that if there's a door, you should enable user to either push/pull/use/open/close interactions to open/close the door.

[m0ds]

One of my favourite GUI's. See my demo "Broken Glass" from s7 page to see my adaptation of that GUI into QBasic. Definitely one to consider for adventure games. It's quite clunky, but one I'd be more than happy to use. It worked quite nicely with FotAQ but I could see it working better with other types of games, and not working at all with certain types too.

Peace