Touch input! Yep this is going to be a phone/tablet game so of course touch inputs are required. It has been an interesting technical exercise to convert touch inputs to the square grid based game – both short, long and drag touches being available. The game is almost ready for its alpha release so the focus is solely aimed towards usability.
What a user wants to do and have it intuitive is interesting. Say there is a unit that the player wants to avoid being attacked by. How best to display its ‘danger range’. The unit could attack, could move, or some combination of both. Having a long hold identifying the total move+attack action is tempting. However, what if the unit has more subtle mechanics than that? If the unit has multiple different attacks that are possible, if the unit could use a combination of movement and attacks and that will change its attack pattern, some attacks being much more effective so they take priority, some units cant attack but knowing its movement range is essential… It is not straightforward when you don’t know exactly what a unit will be able to do to plan what is best to be shown to the user.
There is the possibility of allowing the person making the configuration of each unit to choose what it wants to show. I.e if someone was making a ‘moving wall’ unit, then seeing the movement range would be most useful so that the opposition player can see if the unit has enough range to block up a strategic bottleneck. So each unit would have a set way of giving usability to the user interface. This is most likely how the development will end up but for now I have settled on if it can attack, show the attack range – otherwise show movement range.
There will need to be an extensive test with different users as people will find different ways of interacting and what they find intuitive.