Here beginneth the second part, being the next installment of said wordy tome ... and so on.
David Dunham – Potshot: I think that is very daunting, and it also has about 50% more words than my first draft! It also leaves out some confusing aspects (Elite) in favor of useless trivia (Pz).
I still favor enough text to give a basic overview of the game. Illustrations would definitely supplement this, and in some cases could reduce the text further. This edit is under 250 words (I am assuming they play the shorter Meuse scenario first).
This covers a lot of ground but
- Gives an overview of the battle and its historical length
Lets you know that moves alternate
Mentions combat bonuses, retreat, and breakthrough
Hints at the importance of rivers
Touches on the unique time element
Has maybe too much text on supply, but this has to be mentioned
Mentions Reinforcements (Replacements aren’t in Meuse and could get deleted)
Suggests multiple scenarios
Has the basics of how to win as each side
Battle of the Bulge lets you play “What If?†with Hitler’s last gamble to win World War II.
Player take turns activating a space on the map and moving any or all units in it. Units can only move once a day. Armored units can move two spaces along a road; behind friendly lines it moves three road spaces.
Combat occurs within the active space or one moved into. Each side fires their strength points (white pips on the unit counters). The chance of doing damage depends on factors such as unit type, elite status, or surprise. Terrain, elite status, and other factors provide a defensive bonus or absorb damage. Each point of damage reduces a strength point.
Units might retreat rather than take damage. If armored units completely clear a space, they can move an extra space.
Rivers let defenders block easy movement and gain a bonus against crossings.
Each turn takes an unpredictable amount of time.
The battle lasted almost two weeks, so units must maintain a chain of friendly spaces to a supply source (the eastern map edge for the Axis, any other edge for the Allies). Units out of supply at dawn can’t move or attack.
Reinforcing units and smaller replacements arrive per the historic schedule (see the Calendar screen).
Axis victory depends on the scenario, but always requires moving westward, capturing important spaces and reaching or crossing the Meuse River. The Allies play a delaying game and win if they thwart this.
Supplement this with
- anatomy of a unit (on Jeff’s p. 2), maybe with an expended one as well, but include Elite status!
time chart
Maybe add
- something about combat preview
button callouts
Ros Hermans – Jeff,
I like this. I think it gets right to the point and hits the target of a quick start. Grogs will find and read the rules and/or slog through the whole tutorial. It's the slightly more causal (not Zynga casual) folks that will need to know how to move and fight will figure the rest out as they go.
If there is enough real estate on the second page maybe links out to the tutorial (Learm More) and a play the intro scenario that take you right to RFTM (Jump right in).
Also on the tutorial, I think if you mention that it is detailed and takes about 10 minutes to go though it might not turn folks off wondering how soon it's going to end. That, and/or maybe some sort of visual indicator of progress on the tutorial screens to show how much father they have to go.
Both of those touches I've seen implemented with some success in reducing drop off rates on longer online customer flows at my day job.
David Dunham – Alas, the tutorial takes more like 20 minutes (maybe a bit less with simpler victory conditions).
Here is what my text might look like (body is down to 237 words thanks to the unit anatomy). I added a UI callout for the upper right. We could add one to the upper left, but I caution against filling up space just because it’s there. And Undo seems self-explanatory.
Note that this is easy to localize because there are few text blocks. The main section just scrolls in German.
Showed this on an iPad to Elise (who is no longer a true novice) and she thought it would help if it were before the Tutorial.
BTW, now that I did this, I am of mixed mind whether it should be on the map. This may be too constraining, you want things to flow and Undo is not the first thing to mention.
Pat Ward – I've just scribbled as I think there's still issues with far too much text.
The first one is a mobile safari test with Davids last batch of text. We have to go to a long scrolling page and are still asking the player to read loads of text. If we want the images bigger we can squash the text more the right but we'd need to go the narrative route and have hyperlinked images to be able to see them clearly. Thats beyond the original idea.
The next one was just me trying some labels.
The last one is an attempt to simplify it down to its bare bones but keep it bite sized chunks that are easy to understand and digest. I want big images to avoid excessive time wasted opening and closing hyperlinked images.
I'd imagine one more page about combat, a third of a few extras like time, supply, rivers, unit anatomy etc.and a fourth, which might need to be the first, of victory conditions.
David Dunham – It really comes down to what text — Pat’s has text that I don’t bother with. I guess I figure the tutorial will teach you what things to tap in order to move, but the step-by-step approach doesn’t do as well for giving the big picture.
I don’t know if I like the idea of all the navigation of the right one — would it be possible to slightly reduce the size and make it scroll? (You would just see the top of Combat instead of a link to it.)
I think you added too many illustrations to my text — a picture of the word Retreat doesn’t help, and it is just one more thing you have to look at and absorb.
Pat Ward – Yes you could get away with fewer images.
The only navigation is close and next.
I'm not sure about the best wording of the best concepts to get across. Just needs to be short and too the point.
Nicholas Karp – Pat, I LOVE the quick_start_12.jpg approach
Thinking about how to organize David's concepts into pages/topics
Ability to scroll could work, or plain forward/back arrows to minimize distraction.
Miguel Nieves – I love what you've done Pat! I think the movement screen is a bit too over simplified (but I love the design and flow) and should be split with showing Victory conditions (crossing meuse, holding key points, killing units, briefing Bar)
Jeff Dougherty – I really, really like Quick_start_12. Combines the best of David's concise and well-written text with the visual approach I was trying for with my wireframes. Very well done.
I really like 13, 14, and 15. I have some suggestions for exactly what information to cover on them, especially since your first picture covers turns taking a variable amount of time. Suggestions attached in visual form- basically, have a sentence about how combat works, and about how supply is traced.
Other than that, can we please see mockups?
Then followed some discussion about exactly what approach Jeff wanted me to develop. So quickly moving onto ...
David Dunham – Victory gets into too much scenario-specific detail IMO, and we also need to remind people that the Axis and Allies play differently.
Miguel has suggested talking about victory up front, so perhaps that would be on page 1 (along with parts of IMG_1279)? That could give you these pages:
Battle of the Bulge (not actually titled)
Movement
Combat
More
Anatomy of a unit has to be somewhere. Those elite symbols and unit names are not obvious. And it's a great place to show damage. Keep it short, don't worry about color or even showing both infantry and armor icons.
Might be worth having more small text on Movement — the big text is the stuff you read, but fine print like “Units can only move once a day†is pretty important. Maybe at the bottom of the layout?
Likewise, there needs to be a mention of rivers. Could just be my sentence. But they do confuse people and are perhaps more important in this game than others.
"Press the icons for an explanation" explains the UI not the game. I think we need to mention that there are bonuses for terrain and stuff.
The simple Next is better than a label.
David Dunham – I interpret the naïve results differently. They were having trouble knowing what to do after having gone through the tutorial.
The tutorial does a pretty good job of stepping you through how to move and how to use the combat preview dialog (except for the histogram — good to include that here). They said the game was easy to learn.
What they missed were basics, like activating one space or once per day. Or how to win.
Elise had trouble seeing rivers (like this group) but more importantly knowing what they meant. That is the big picture stuff that I want people to know exists.
Some of this needs to be addressed by other means, like showing combat odds all the time or doing something with river visibility.
Jeff Dougherty – OK, then we should have time in on 15...although I still think we need to tell them something about how supply happens or doesn't happen. If possible I think we should also have something on 12 like the "what if" text, which works well as an attention-getter and provides context for the whole thing.
Jeff Dougherty – OK, revised: here's wireframes for the "Battle of the Bulge" and "Misc" screens.
Jeff Dougherty – OK, so. David has convinced me that the abbreviations guide is unnecessary once people know that the tag at the bottom of the unit is a name. Deleting that frees up quite a bit of space, which I'm good with as the first slide was pretty cluttered.
David Dunham – I really dislike Abbreviations, it doesn’t convey anything you need to know.
To reduce volume, get rid of Units. Yes British may confuse you, but they come in late in the second scenario. Let’s not confuse you NOW.
And I guess we disagree, but you should play Meuse first so we don’t have to mention VP for kills.
Again, I think we need to mention that the style of play is different. This encourages the Allied player to kill units, which is probably not their best strategy. They should play a waiting game. For them, “what do I do now†is often nothing.
Jeff Dougherty – And revised.
Pat Ward – Looking to make it like my grandads WW2 photo album. some photos, some cut up cards, newspaper clippings etc. Snapshots of the bigger picture. Tried to leave enough space to keep it feeling light and provide enough space for German translations. Tested on iPad 2 for text readability.
HTML over a static background image.
David Hoeft – A couple of other thoughts based on my tests with naive players... (whose biggest complaints about the old tutorial were that it was too wordy/too long and that once they finished it, they still didn't have a sense of where to go or what to do).
On the first screen, make starting positions clear for both sides, as well as the Meuse. (I had imagined a series of three quick animated magic-marker lines: "these are the Axis positions", "this is the thin Allied line", "this is the Axis goal- to cross the Meuse!")
On the Combat screen make it clear that the combat preview screen shows probable outcome, not guaranteed. Could insert some comment like "no plan survives contact with the enemy..."
Overall I think this new approach is great, though!
Jeff Dougherty – Pat,
I really like what you've done. One thing we should probably mention under "Movement": the restrictions on movement during December 16th for German armor during predawn and Allied infantry. Don't need to get too far into it, but people are going to want to know why their pieces don't move...
Other than that, it really looks good.
Pat Ward – Jeff, some text added to step 2. (ignore the bad spelling .. its fixed)
On the first screen, make starting positions clear for both sides, as well as the Meuse. (I had imagined a series of three quick animated magic-marker lines: "these are the Axis positions", "this is the thin Allied line", "this is the Axis goal- to cross the Meuse!")
I'd not planned on animating it but was going to scribble over with grease pencil ala the briefing. But animated sounds cool. I'm wondering if I can get away with simply a gif. Watch this space.
On the Combat screen make it clear that the combat preview screen shows probable outcome, not guaranteed. Could insert some comment like "no plan survives contact with the enemy..."
Well currently it says BOLD value = most likely number of hits.
Nothing is promised there (most likely) though maybe it needs to be more explicit. Jeff?
David Dunham – It sounded like you would be able to change text pretty easily? I'd propose a number of text edits, but figured that could come at any time.
Pat Ward – It'll be HTML so Jeff, Eric or Nick will be responsible for final copy but I'd rather get it as close to done now while I can change or remove pictures since the layout governs how much text I can fit and ultimately the design.
I don't want to go beyond five images a page and to keep as much white space as possible. They're already starting to look cramped and word heavy which makes people less likely to read them and defeats the object.
We've still got to fit German in the same space and the font can't go any smaller.
Jeff Dougherty – OK, in that case I'm going to stop niggling and let you produce these things. I have some text edits but those can go in at any time, and the basic format in terms of images and such looks good to me. We can go to 4 images on a page if we need to make more room, but I'd rather keep this as visual as possible.
Nicholas Karp – Some thoughts on overall look and layout:
For screens where sequence matters, there might be an arrow from one image to the next (for me, the visual flow of the "COMBAT" is 1..2..5..4..3..NEXT)
Since it's HTML, any good reason not to allow BACK as well as NEXT?
Not as pretty, but think about reducing the size and visual impact of the controls (Close/Next): the pages are so busy that making them standard utilitarian buttons or arrows might help.
The typeface/size is going to be really hard to read on a mini.
Looking at details of copy/content now.
David Dunham – Back and Next are both links to different files, so that would be possible. But there are only 4. You could certainly have arrows on each side of "2/4" to accomodate both suggestions.
And yeah, bigger text is friendly too. (iPad mini will likely make us want to bump up the size in a number of places. We'll know more on Friday.)
(Quick note here: I've fought tooth and nail to avoid overlarge text in this game. I hate the way many games have oversized text and look like a childrens early learning book or something made for OAP's with poor eyesight. Now I've got bad eyesight, as has my wife, and we could both easily read all the text in Bulge (it's also easily readable on the Mini). Now I know that often this is a legacy of designing for phones but we weren't and even if we did go to a smaller form we'd need such a complete redesign of the whole game that changing font size is trivial. As for the use of arrows .. we had steadfastly avoided icons through out the game very deliberatly. We'd also defined two different types of buttons, the black bakelite and the paper curl with finger print which were, as much as possible, used in context. So while it looks like I ignore certain comments .. there's usually a reason .. I'm an old, cantancherous git with ideas of grandeur. )
David Hoeft – One more thing just for consideration... as a means of helping players to get a better sense both of the historical context AND what they are trying to do.
Take a look at this site, and click through the day-to-day situation map/frontline map:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections ... ssay1.html
What if there was an animated screen showing our map, with the real historical front line changing as it did historically, and with either text or voiceover saying something like "this is what really happened... can you, as the Germans/Axis, do better, and push your armored spearheads across the Meuse? or, as the Allies, stop the panzers in their tracks?"
Something like this might help to orient folks better to what each side is trying to achieve, and make them aware of the benchmarks that they are trying to beat in order to 'win' at the game.
(Note: this very thing had been discussed a few months earlier. It was certainly something I wanted to add to the Day-by-Day historical section to help visualising the narrative but the team felt the time taken to create the maps would be better spent else where when we had the 12th Army situational maps we could use. So we limited it to the four maps in the main historical area.)
Here endeth the second part of what is becoming a major work of literature ..
Illustrating it is great, I thought you were proposing something that was almost all illustration (which would be awesome if we could do it, but seems very hard).
