Demo Feedback - Improving Ring Menu Navigation

[seir]

First, I'll just say very good demo, well done, looking forward to the game--just backed it on Kickstarter. You can thank the Cole's for including a link to your project in their Hero-U newsletter!

I've got some feedback for the Ring style menu. I liked the first option for the Ring style menu (activate when letting go of button). While using this flavor, I found that I naturally tended to just drag toward the icon and let go at various distances from it.  However, this would sometimes cause the action to not actually take place, since I'd either let go before or after the reaching the icon. If you've ever used SketchBook Pro, you'll see the pattern there--it has a similar ring interface and lets you just drag toward an icon and let go at any point on the path to activate it.

So, my suggestion for improving the usability of the ring interface is to change the clickable region for the icons to extend before and after the icon by a bit (or the letting-goable region, if you will ).  This makes using the ring menu much more fluid and gives the users some wiggle room for how they use it.

Of course, you wouldn't want to clickable area to start immediately at the center of the ring, otherwise something could get inadvertently clicked when a person opens the menu and just moves a couple pixels.

See my attached screenshot, with overlays highlighting the potential clickable area for each of the icons.

[DrJones]

We were considering to tweak that interface already, but that graphic is amazing; very descriptive and would be quite easy to implement (far more than tweaking the graphics). I'll urge the programming team to implement it. Thank you very much for this suggestion!

[GameDevChris]

The thing that makes this addition somewhat difficult is a limitation in the AGS engine related to the shape of GUI buttons. The editor only allows GUI buttons to be square or rectangular shaped and not run diagonally or have unusual shapes.

It may be possible to implement something like this with multiple invisible buttons (a bit messy, but it would do the job), so we'll make note of it and keep it in mind.

Thanks for the good suggestion!

[DrJones]

How about using a hotspot mask instead of a button, then program that hotspot mask to have it press the button? I'm not sure if it's doable, but that might allow us to have shapes like the one on the image. Though now that I think about it, I don't know if you can place a mask on the same place the GUI will appear. Hmmm... anytime you try to do something fancy AGS starts to protest.

[seir]

Haha, thanks for the feedback on my feedback guys! Ah, limitations of the tools, but the tradeoffs in time saved from having to build your own engine from scratch are well worth it

Congrats on meeting the $120K stretch goal, by the way, just a couple more hours to go!