UI Feedback & Streamlining

[Eric.B]

Good evening, Killrob, I know who you are. I check up on Automation once and a while myself. It's a great game you guys have. I've been meaning to send you guys a thank you for the Facebook post, but just in case I keep procrastinating; "Thanks a bunch!"

For me personally I found it rather difficult to find my way into it despite watching the three pretty good YouTube tutorials you posted. 2h into the game I still haven't sold my first car, and I have no clue why that may be.

That is peculiar. What city are you trying to sell them in? How much does the car cost? Is there any AI in that city? Is the memos window on the desk giving you any warnings?

GearCity is geared fairly accurate to sales figures for the period, so in smaller cities (less than 100k people) and lower percapitas (less than $150) you're going to have a hard time moving any units until roughly 1907ish. Assuming the AI hasn't already filled that void.

I'll be testing an entirely new sales system in next few weeks. So maybe that will help out somewhat in making sales a little more even.

I track this back to a general lack of UI feedback, obscuring dependencies and making it unnecessarily difficult to make choices based on anything but gut feeling - which makes it very tough and somewhat frustrating for people not being used to the game yet.

A lot of the fluff is missing (specially in the car designer). By fluff I mean hovering tool tips and info boxes that are completely empty. Eventually we'll get to this.

The major example I'd like to give you here is 5-star rating concept, which in its current form doesn't allow for detailed feedback on your design choices. Sometimes in component or car design moving a slider from minimum to maximum changes exactly nothing in the star rating, while having a huge effect on price. This makes it incredibly difficult to gauge if your money is well invested or not. I would suggest you give all your star ratings at least one decimal (e.g. 3.7 stars), for more direct feedback to the player's actions, especially considering you are working with non-integer values in the underlying calculations anyway.

Interesting observation and the sort of thing I was looking for in feedback. Most of the estimations (star system) I wrote before all the ratings were finalized. So I probably really do need to expand upon that panel, and increase the details of the star system. The same needs to be done when building a new branch and factory. Greatly noted, and ticketed. Thank you sir!

Also, the road to getting your cars to sell could be somewhat more comfortable: adding an option to autofill all current projects on a monthly basis would have saved me many turns of wasting money. Removing some depth of UI branching in the different design stages would give a better overview and reduce lots of the unnecessary clicking-through-all-windows. It's seldom you make use of more than a small part of the screen at any given time in the design stages.

If you don't mind me asking what do you mean by "autofill all current projects."

Utilizing the "Quick Menu" (clicking the abacus and later calculator on the desk) you can do everything by hitting buttons except building a factory,branch,car,carpart, and setting production lines. Within the next 3 or 4 features added I will be adding an "All in One" window much like Detroit had where you can control branches/factories/research/etc from the office.

This UI branching with lots of pop-ups is made more frustrating by the fact that the tiny windows currently dislike being closed, I found myself clicking X on average two times per window, so I guess either I should practice more FPS, or those windows/buttons need to be made somewhat bigger for better usability.

May I ask if you're using a laptop trackpad? This has been a problem with laptop users (as well placing tires.) I should have bigger close buttons in the next patch.


Anyway, Glad you tried my game, and good luck to yours! I think you're going to have a much bigger hit than mine.