[UX-Design] New Move Indicators, Move Filter & Two Starting Decks

Pretender · September 2017

The strength of Absolver is that once you are past the first barrier of understanding the mechanics, understanding the meta requires a lot of intuition. It is possible that I am biased, but without any experience with fighting games, card games and so forth to speak of, I feel like Absolver becomes intuitive very quickly even for the uninitiated. You can explain it with words to others, for sure, but it's also a lot about feeling out your own preferences.

What that also means, though, is that this game demands a lot of experimentation and self-reflection. I find the navigation of moves to be rather restrictive at this moment, though.

TL;DR Version

>>>Change New Move Indicators - The meditation interface draws attention to new moves that you have learned. However, the new move indicator gets drowned out by special move indicators. Instead, consider a color-inversion to highlight new moves so you can find them more quickly.
>>>Move/Equipment Filter - When I'm changing my combat deck, it's nice to be able to filter moves based on the information the game provides. In the spirit of the game, match "greater/lesser than" limits with known moves to create filters like "faster than haymaker" rather than "faster than this number".
>>>Open Two Deck Slots From The Start - The spirit of the game demands experimentation. By locking a player to one combat deck, you run the risk of locking players into their first order optimal strategy rather than getting better. Providing two combat decks from the start allows for rapid A/B testing by beginning players to quickly get a grasp of game mechanics.

In my next posts, >>>I will elaborate on these suggestions in greater depth and in the posts after that, >>>I will provide counter arguments to my own suggestions.

Pretender · September 2017

Discovered Moves

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When I have acquired new moves, it will take me minutes to find the bloody things. I don't know whether that's down to the single pip being too small or too much like the special indicators.

I just gloss over them. So maybe an outline indicator or a color inversion would draw more attention to the new moves. This is important not just for new players who want to discover the new cool moves that they have acquired, but also for old players who have started with a new character and are hunting for a specific move set.

Otherwise, new moves feel more like clutter than they do treasures. The less oversight humans have, the more likely it is that they will dismiss what is under the clutter as not important enough to actually sort out. Or, the other way around, people will obsessively keep scrolling through the menus to find that one move that they know is there, but cannot find.

This time scrolling would be better spent enjoying the core gameplay.

>x> No Corresponding Counter Argument; Back to Table of Content

Pretender · September 2017

Move Filter

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I personally find the navigation of Duel Links to be rather obtuse. Not all of the filters make sense; you often have to specify negative filters to get rid of any cards that you deliberately don't want to apply. It still provides a good template for this game, however, with some adjustments.

Absolver plays best on controls, so these menus would need to be configured, of course. However, I think that it can be fairly easily achieved by using sliders and tabs. Imagine that, for the numerical values, you use a slider. For example, let's say that you are looking for moves that are "More Powerful Than..." You activate the slider and you move it around. To make it even more intuitive, though, you can visually represent the limit by showing a move that is closest to the limit that you have set. For example, you slide it to 135 and it will say "More Powerful Than... The Haymaker" complete with the picture. Here's my cobbled together representation of what that might look like;

More Powerful Than... "Haymaker"

This allows you to quickly create a visual language that can positively influence the meta. By discussing power, speed and range in terms of "More than " rather than "More than ", you can contextualize move sets a lot better.

Other filters could include things like "Guard Break", which the game already has indicators for. Negative filters would also be good. So, it'd be a three-sided toggle; "OFF", "YES" and "NO". So, if I want to filter moves which are not guard breaks, I'd navigate the filters with my D-pad or left analog stick, hit "X" or "A" to activate the toggle and then move one left or two right to select "NO". Before I've even locked the toggle in, the moves should already be filtering to validate to me, as the user, that I'm filtering moves the way that I want to before I lock in my new filter.

Any of these design ideas should also apply to equipment. Given that there is no way currently to dump your equipment (afaik after a google search), I suspect that finding the gear I want will become more and more difficult.

>>>Corresponding Counter Arguments

Pretender · September 2017

Two Deck Slots Open from Start

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I've found myself rather frustrated by the lack of deck slots. I have managed to create a combat deck that I'm very satisfied with, despite being the wrong method for it. It'd probably do a lot better in Windfall. I want to create more combat decks, but because I'm still at the very start of the game, I've not gotten any combat decks opened yet.

I think that this goes against the spirit of the game. Absolver is a lot about feeling out what you do and experimentation. If you combat deck doesn't work, you need to adjust it. But sometimes, a combat deck you've constructed is just particularly bad against a particular other combat style. Maybe you need to switch to something that ducks and jumps over attacks more because you're up against an opponent with a lot of high and low kicks. But you don't want to lose your general combat deck.

In the early game, you're prevented from doing this because you have one combat deck and one combat deck only. I don't know about you guys, but having refined my style and coming up with combinations that just work for me is something that I'm not quite as willing to give up.

I feel that there should be at least two deck slots open from the very start. One for your main combat deck and one to experiment with new moves that you've won. This can be your way to A/B test your move sets on performance against the same enemy, to get a grasp of the game mechanics, but also your way of having a "dicking around" deck and a "serious mode" deck. Experimentation is important.

In my next post, I will be providing counter arguments against my own suggestions for your consideration. Those should help push the discussion forward.

>>>Corresponding Counter Arguments

Pretender · September 2017

Counter Arguments

Counter to Move Filters

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This functionality is important, because it allows for a more contextualized though process about what moves you want to include in your style. However, I also see a danger; the equivalent of powergaming. Now, what I don't mean is people might actually git gud. I mean that players might lose themselves in the 'crunch' of the game. Absolver, thus far, has been a very pleasurable experience for me exactly because it's more driven by intuition and self-reflection because of that layer of abstraction. I am personally not in agreement with people who would claim that more information is always better.

Disclaimer: Jargon in-coming
Especially in Absolver, I actually find the lack of information relaxing. It provokes what I will call "non-logocentric" thought, also known as the "stream of consciousness" thought. Logocentrism is a name to explain the perspective that ideas expressed in words and numbers are more valid than the alternative. The opposite ("stream of consciousness") is still thought, but it's less "I need a move that is more powerful than the one I've been using here" and more "let's try something different".

An element of that is also "confabulation". Absolver makes a lot of use of "confabulation" in part of it's design. In fighting games, it's thoughts like "oh, look at what I did" despite doing so purely accidentally. Humans are wired to attribute actions to intentions. Even when we know that we're not the one making the decision, our brain tricks us into believing we did. For example, did you ever play a game, looking at the wrong section of the screen? You may have been mildly confused why your character did a spin-kick when you asked for a jump. You still think you were the one who made him do that because you pushed a button and something happened. Then, you realize that you are looking at your mate's character while your own is running into walls. That is confabulation.

When you're making new move sets with little to no information, many players will surrender to this stream of consciousness. They are scrolling through moves. They find a move and they add it to their combat deck thinking "ah, that's what I need", instead of "this is exactly to my specifications".

This is a powerful process in the meta. It's how I decided to put a heavy move in my hind-left quadrant into front-left quadrant, with a guard break alt in front-left to back to hind-left and a fast swipe alt move in hind-left to front-right with a combo back to hind-left. Though this went against the advice that I had been given, this allowed me to quickly switch two-hit combos of "guard-break into power attack" and "swipe low, swipe high".

I could never have come up with that move set if I'd been crunching the numbers. Which I do tend to do when I have the opportunity. Instead, I confabulated the move-set, due to a lack of logocentric indicators.

>>>Link Back to Original Argument

Pretender · September 2017

Counter to Two Starting Decks

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As mentioned in my previous counter-argument against move filter is that having only one starting deck can force you to adapt away from your first order optimal strategy when it stops working. First order optimal strategies are powerful strategies which pack a lot of punch without needing a lot of complexity and nuance to execute.

The noob tube is an example of this. See the Extra Credits video about "Balancing for Skill". The risk of these FOO strategies is that if they stay viable for very long, the player can start feeling lax about adapting their strategy, up and until they find a challenge that they cannot overcome with this FOO strategy.

By restricting a player to a single deck, it's possible that players are forced to start adapting their FOO strategy immediately. Either due to a mistake in controls that results in them deleting a move that they don't know how to get back and putting in anything else. This can make players realize that the game is a lot more forgiving towards arbitrary additions to an existing combat deck, thus spurring a greater spirit of experimentation until they get their second deck slot.

It's also possible that too much A/B testing on part of the player may lead to false beliefs about certain moves being sub-optimal in the general rather than the specific. For example, a player makes a deck that optimizes strength despite being a dex build and it doesn't end up working. This seems like a minor risk, though.