Hello there!

When I discover a new game, I usually spot a few things that could be done better and/or fixed, and then I send them to the developers, hoping that it's a useful feedback. On RWR, however, I decided to open a topic so that everyone can react, I hope you guys will see my points and most of all I hope pasik will find that an interesting read. These are my humble suggestions to improve this (already great) game and I hope you'll take it as such.
If some things I point out are supposed to be changed later - no problem, it's even cooler!
If you disagree about something - you can! it's only my opinion, I tried to describe issues a newcomer might spot with his "fresh eyes".
Also, sorry about my engRish :p

RWR is the kind of game that I should want to launch when I've got a few minutes to spare, when I want to chill and empty my head. However, a few things prevent me and I guess prevent some other casual gamers from really using the game as such and see it as easy to use.

The first of these things is the goal of the game. I think there could be a few things changed so that:
- Players could know what is the global goal of their game,
- Players could know easily during the game where they need to go to be the most useful.

1) When you click on "Start a new game", you get the following screen:



At this point, you don't know what is the goal of the game (and it won't be told during the game). Kill everyone? Capture all enemy bases? If yes, Does the "Number of initial occupied bases", if set to 1-2-3, means you control more bases than your opponent? That is quite unclear.
Also, the "initial rank". What does it mean? I tested it, and it seems you control more IA soldiers. Why then would anyone chose 0 and not 7? And if it is "initial", does that mean you can get promoted? How? To me, these questions must find a clear answer on this screen (or in a tutorial), but I guess it's quite planned.

2) The next screen is quite interesting. It is the minimap, one of the things I think that should be a bit reworked.



Forgive the size of the picture

I don't understand anything here, and I think it's one of the key if you want to make this game easier to approach, and by then have more players.
First of all, green/grey squares. Do they mean one square belongs to a faction? Are they purely informative or do you get a soldier income from them or some other thing? How do you control one square? How do you control the squares on the sea? All of this needs to be explained, imo.

3) The triangle that represents you should be something else, for two reasons: a) in a multiplayer game it's not easy to see which triangle you are, and b) it is too big, and yet not visible enough (strangely). You can't glance at the minimap and see where you are, and also it is too inaccurate to tell you where you are precisely. My suggestion would be to replace it with a rectangle showing the part of the map your screen currently displays, which would be quite informative and visible.

4) Red and yellow circles. I don't get anything about them: why some are red and others yellow, why some are coloured and others are not, what are the numbers in them (here "2", "6", "7"). I also see these numbers somewhere else (left of my position), and I don't understand anything about it either.

5) Actually, the whole minimap thing is a bit uncomfortable. It hides half of the screen so you can't have it open all the time, yet you absolutely need to look at it often. If you decide to keep it like that, my opinion would be that it'd be cool if the minimap was at least a bit transparent. I personally think it also fails to really inform you on things going on (even if you understand what the red and yellow circles are ), because you don't really know where and how many soldiers there are near you.

6) The bar in the bottom-right corner... What is it? Does it represent map control? It doesn't look like it, if I look at the minimap (which seems fairly divided between grey and green).

So... In the end, these are only a few questions and problems that a random casual player might encounter in the game. If you want more players, I'd simply advise to look at these few points, but maybe some other forum members disagree. Thanks pasik for making this great game and long live RWR!

I don't have many problems with the enlarged map, but I was going to suggest a minimap in one of the corners (perhaps if some people despise it they can turn it off), but it is really a hassle to have to check every few blocks if you need to attend to something in a particular direction. It certainly lowers your survivability if you are trying to see where you are while in combat, and I think that effective play necessitates constant awareness of what is going on in the larger scheme of the battlefield.

Edit: Removed unnecessary sentence.

Thanks for the feedback Izual!

Your points are most valid, and all I can say is that the usability elements of the game are worked on, although they are very very low priority so the progress is very slow. Nevertheless, trust me, I don't think they are usable either, far from it. Ah, placeholders, that's the word

We chatted about this already in the chat, but I'm going to bring it up here as well, that I personally as a developer assume that the type of people who tend to try new alpha/beta grade games have learned to expect that not an awful lot of things are explained, there might not be tutorials or even help, and they end up playing the game in all kinds of "wrong" ways until they figure out which is the right way on their own or by searching through forums or wikis.

Rest assured, things will become more self-explanatory so that a new player doesn't have to go through trial and error with every single thing. Some things are better left to be discovered during the course of the game, but the menu, map or the hud isn't really the place to act all mysterious.

Back to the topic of the map occluding some of the screen, at some point I actually had a thought that the little soldier itself in the field would also lift up a piece of map in front of him and put the weapon away, so that there would be a small animation when closing the map so you'd have to be extra cautious when to take a look at the map

I'm such a nasty guy.

Yay, a triple post!

One thing that's coming for sure is the visual markers for events of interest in some ways similar to what you see about other players' whereabouts currently, near the screen edges. This should also make navigating a lot easier.

I have to admit not fully understanding the map either, but I know you've mentioned it will change in the (possibly distant) future so I don't let it bother me. Regardless of the direction you take the map I do think having some indicators at the edge of the screen would help a lot--basically one for your offensive objective and defensive objective. With these it's entirely possibly a player could just ignore the map completely. If and when you add more objectives apart from capturing zones this might get a bit more hectic but Section 8 uses a similar system and it's pretty good.

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=445

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

After closing the map there could be an arrow pointing towards your objective and maybe an arrow pointing towards the defense objective. It should fade after a few seconds, just to give you a general idea of where to go. This way you could tap the map button to see where to go quickly.

As for player icons, I've noticed in multiplayer with a lot of players there's times where a player has the same color as another player. You could have it so there's 3 or f4 different shapes, so one player could be a blue square while another is a blue star, perhaps. This should be reflected by the symbol underneath their feet.

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Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.

yes the multiple players with the same colors has been brought up to pasik before. Not sure when he will decide to deal with it but I am assuming that the jeep mechanics are more important right now.

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

There is 12(!) different colors by now, but obviously that's not enough in the long run. It's difficult to find very distinct colors without making them all shiny and annoying. Feels like I'm back to EGA times, 4 more colors to spend, and one of them is given to squad AI already. There also seems to be a bug that the map marker colors do not stay that well in sync with the field/edge marker colors.

OzyThesage's suggestion about the shape might be the way out here. Initially I was thinking that it would make them appear distracting and inconsistent, but maybe it doesn't matter that much in the end.

And yes, jeep is #1 currently.