Occupied Forces: Nobody tells you when you're single.

ID:61216
 
Apr 4 2009, 2:19 pm
Something I tried experimenting with in Occupied Forces was always having a help file available for the current phase. I believe the experiment failed. I think players were intimidated by the amount of reading. I repeated sections of the main help file and even wrote down what players would see when they click a territory (as if they couldn't just take a look themselves). I intended for it all be optional, but some may have thought it was mandatory.

Now the only thing players should worry about reading through is the main help file. It can be found in the same section as the house rules so all of the reading is in one place. Meanwhile, the interface of each phase includes helpful text inside of it rather than hidden in paragraphs of HTML.

I also rearranged the March phase interface so that the helpful text shows up at the top-left (for normal English reading) instead of the bottom-right. When I brought it up, a person reading over my shoulder asked why it wasn't like that in the first place. The reason is simple. I didn't think of it and nobody else mentioned it.



I wizened up and started cropping my pictures instead of using my screen resolution so pardon the dimensions in this comparison.
Before After


Here's the list of changes as typed in the game:
  • Subscribers and BYOND Members now have their wins and completions recorded on the hub page.
  • The names of BYOND Members are now referral links to their hub pages in the chat and people sections.
  • The How To Play section was revised.
  • The phase instructions have been replaced with more concise instructions within the interface.
  • The House Rules and How To Play sections were merged.
  • The interface might be more responsive due to merged winset() commands.
  • Fixed: BYOND Member avatars should again be recognized and they need no longer be PNGs.
  • Fixed: Units in the Units tab were not always displayed when the game was run in Dream Seeker.
  • Fixed: Territories which should have been neutral could still have been marked as player-owned from prior games.
Apr 4 2009, 4:26 pm
I know I've said this before, but I think the reliance on the opacity setting for your divs is hurting readability. I've found it pretty hard to read your posts lately because of the loss of contrast--the problem is that the opacity setting applies to text (and images) as well as to the background.

I highly recommend switching to using a translucent .png instead--the only down side is you'll lose the curved borders along the bottom of the div until Firefox ever gets around to fixing that. I have 25% black and 50% black PNGs I use in my blog's CSS (and in Dungeon Crawlers), which you're welcome to co-opt for your own use if you like.
Apr 4 2009, 5:34 pm
Forget the rounded corners. What I'd really like is the ability to override opacity in child elements instead of just an IE-only hack.

What if I just increase the opacity a bit for posts and comments, like this?
Apr 4 2009, 5:37 pm
Ah, I found the other part of the problem. You have color:silver throughout your CSS and that's also hurting the contrast quite a lot. With white text the opacity issue probably wouldn't matter quite so much.
Apr 4 2009, 5:51 pm (Edited on Apr 4 2009, 10:12 pm)
Okie dokie. The text for posts and comments is now white. I was trying to keep it a different shade than the links, but I just made them a soft green instead and removed my hover changes. I'm leaving the side boxes alone for now. I'll probably want to adjust the forums at some point though.
Apr 4 2009, 10:26 pm
I made the green harder, found a matching purple, and ran with it across my site. The forums are more opaque and have more contrast. The side boxes have less contrast with the purple matching the background image, but I think it puts more focus on the center.

It has sort of a 1980s neon candy thing going on... I like it. *shrug*
Apr 5 2009, 6:15 am
Ah, this is way better. I bet you could easily do a lighter purple instead of the light green if you wanted to stay true to the purple theme, but the text readability is definitely much improved.