UXQuality of life improvements

Post » Sat Feb 13, 2016 9:46 pm

Fallout Shelter has been entertaining me in small sessions since the night it was announced; I enjoy your take on the tower management genre and I have always loved the Vault Boy aesthetic. That said, there are some tweaks that would significantly polish the experience by making mundane tasks less painful. These won't add longevity to the game, but they will remove friction/annoyance from each session. I have added my suggested minimal fixes to each problem, but I'm sure there are other ideas out there that would work better for more effort.



Objective Notice Placement


The objective progress notice pops up directly over the Rush button for rooms. I know that the focus of interaction is toward the bottom right (closer to most people's dominant thumb?) and vertical space is at a premium on a phone held sideways, but this choice means that when you have an objective for resources, rushes, or incidents you are actively blocking the user from progressing the reported task. I have to wait for the progress notice to time out *or* click it and kill the resulting pop up to save time ... I can't decide which is more annoying so I go back and forth. This happens constantly and interrupts your primary accomplishment loop.



Please move the objective progress pop-up or the rush button, or at least introduce an optional second location in a future patch if you are concerned about confusing existing users.



Combat Healing


Other people on the board have already complained about the about the "dweller shuffle" that happens during attacks, but IMO there are some significantly larger problems with the healing minigame that starts whenever a room is under attack... The health bars overlap each other so you can't see who is most hurt, the characters also overlap so you can't necessary click on the one you need to, and the double-click gesture for focusing the room is far to easy to accidentally trigger when frantically hitting the right thing--there is nothing as frustrating as being auto-zoomed away from dying dwellers getting ripped apart and then trying to pan back to them.



Please turn off the double-click zoom gesture during attacks *or* change it to zoom to the full width of a 3-unit room instead of locking to the middle section and losing the edges on a 4:3 screen. This should prevent frantic clicking from moving the intended target off screen. Turning off the automatic zoom to the wasteland during these events (after the initial display of incoming raiders/deathclaws) would be nice for similar reasons.



Please stack overlapping health bars vertically so that they are always fully visible -- when two characters occupy the same space, the health bars should push vertically apart. I think this would work best if the lowest percentage heath had "priority" and always pushed the greater one upward, creating a consistent natural sort order and preventing the most important piece of information from moving off camera if it was already on an edge. This ties into my next request...



Finally, please allow users to click on a dweller's health bar to bring up the dweller stat/inventory/stimpack interface. If you use the stacking health bars suggested above, this means that there is always a clear indicator on screen that users can click on without compromising the existing animation system for the dwellers or inventing a more complex gesture for clicking one standing behind another. I believe this is a solid compromise between the current art direction and the frustration of being unable to save a dweller who is probably nearly dead but can't be clicked on because the camera angle isn't quite right. This only comes up during incidents since that's where health bars should show (there is that other bug where they stick around, but that's a different topic).



Post-Combat Healing


This is a relatively minor complaint compared to the others, but I really would like to be able to heal my dwellers without pressing the list interface, scrolling to one that needs a heal, clicking on them, and then going back to the top of the list again to rescroll to the next one.



Suggestion #1 -- clicking the "Dwellers #/#" header multiple times should alternate between an alphabetic sort (current functionality) and a health sort from low to high with dead people on top.



Suggestion #2 -- remember which entry was at the top of the list scroll each time the list is used and re-scroll to that position before display when it is reopened so that people can resume a scan.

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