Hi! I’ve been following this game for awhile now and am very much looking forward to see how it turns out, but I also know that this is the best time to give a little feedback here and there to maybe influence certain elements of the game, so here I am. After watching the recent video update on the additions to the job system, I couldn’t help noticing something that I think has been this way awhile now in some form or another, which is the somewhat messy citizen roster UI element.
This is probably really low priority for now, but I thought I’d suggest maybe organizing the citizens by their job on the citizen roster and making it so that when you hover over the job banner, it would be selected and a list of all the citizens assigned to that profession would appear. Like so, in this very rough mockup.
As the jobs are changed/upgraded, or if there are simply general job categories, all the citizens could be organized under these categories or, if changed/upgraded, reorganized as the case may be under the appropriate banner. I’m not sure if separate villages will eventually be founded in the game (i.e. ability to separate and organize your citizens as such), but if this were the case, then you could nest these various jobs under village banners which function similarly to how I describe these job banners’ functioning.
Like I said, probably not incredibly high priority stuff for the moment, but something I thought might be worth contributing to be considered. Thanks for making this neat game and being transparent in your development! =)
your mockup has been embedded in the post… and i have to say, i like the concept! very straight-forward… could see this being very useful once we start to reach larger numbers of citizens…
Oh hell yeah I already ran into this problem have about 20 guys running around and can’t figure out whose who half the time, the colors and stuff seem to run all together and i go cross-eye’d especially squinting when your are using the scroll bar… UGH!
+1 @Gmr_Leon although I have to take a 1/4 point off for the missing footman/weaver icon J/K
Thanks @SteveAdamo for embedding it for me. New user limitations and all. =P
Also I’m glad you like the concept! Nothing groundbreaking, but simple, to the point, and effectively scalable, I think. My favorite sort of design. =)
Haha, I can totally see that happening! I’ve run into this in countless other strategy titles that don’t have a completely solid unit grouping hotkey config available or something along those lines. All your guys start blending together and making your eyes go nuts. D=
Also, darn footman/weaver icon, I knew I should have used the icons from the job assignment window instead! =P
I like it! Perhaps filtering first by those big groups of your first mockup, then the icons of the classes pertaining to the selected group would be shown in a row below them. That way the window doesn’t get cluttered with all of the classes but still allows to search citizens by specific class.
? That sounds like what I was trying to suggest. Sorry if I’m misunderstanding @Relyss.
To reiterate my thinking:
Mouse hover over big job banner icon, rows of those assigned to that job appear below.
When you want to switch to a different job, mouse hover over the next banner, and rows of those assigned to that job appear.
So on and so forth.
I don’t have the game though, so maybe that’s where the misunderstanding is coming from. Do some of the old jobs remain even after the new ones are unlocked, and this is what you are referring to? If this is the case, then I fully agree that general job category banners, followed by particular “sub”-job icons/banners that, when hovered over, those assigned to them appear in rows (similar to what I have now) below the icons.
And as I said in regards to villages, it can all be gracefully layered together. =D
