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[HiVE]

Thank you, Spooner! You've given us lots to think about - some of those suggestions are excellent. We'll start procesing them at once!

But:

* I found the continual flickering of the interface quite distracting, although I accept that it fits in with the art style. I'd like to be able to turn that effect off, or at least vastly reduce its frequency, in the options.

Do you mean the code scroller specifically, or the general buzzing of all the lit-up areas? Is there anywhere specific which you'd most like to soften, or just everything?

* The button-group lights might be improved if they had a progress bar (or multiple lights) underneath them that light up as each button is pressed. Not too important though.

We don't understand what you mean here - what progress would it signify? You mean the four lights under the program window and central ring on the interface? They don't do anything when you press them... you must mean somewhere else but we can't tell where. Sorry!

Thanks again. We'll have an update for you soon...

[Spooner]

Glad you found my suggestions and other reports useful

Do you mean the code scroller specifically, or the general buzzing of all the lit-up areas? Is there anywhere specific which you'd most like to soften, or just everything?

The code-scroller does flicker and move quite a lot, so draws my attention away from the actual meat and bones of the game. The real annoyance, however, is that all text and a lot of interface elements flickers all the time. If it flickered a bit, once every few seconds, or if the flickering was a lot more subtle (smoother sine wave glow rather than on-off flickering perhaps?), it might be fine.

We don't understand what you mean here - what progress would it signify? You mean the four lights under the program window and central ring on the interface? They don't do anything when you press them... you must mean somewhere else but we can't tell where. Sorry!

I mean that you'd have a solid bar or a series of lights which lit as the buttons were pressed. When they were all activated, then all the lights would be lit and the effect (opening/closing exits) would occur. The position would be just under the list of switch effect indicators, down in the bottom right (you happen to have a graphic down there that initially I thought would be doing just this, but it is cosmetic). I'm not completely convinced this would actually be really very useful, when I think about it, and certainly if there is a row of lights, that would limit the number of switches that you could have in the game. Just throwing a random idea into the hat...as I say, not convinced how much it would help the UI.

[HiVE]

Update! v1.3 - 140611

As usual - get it here (29.5Mb .ZIP)

Changes
{

• 'Streamline selection box' settings option (screenshot, bottom-left)
• Cancel button on selection box
• Back button on menu screens
• Keyboard 1-4- shortcuts for programs
• Tooltip within-screen-boundary display limit
• 'Read message again' button - top-right, near the objectives tick
• Reduced UI flicker intensity, especially when alt. selection box option checked
• Unintended solution on Metronomics now supported
• All-start and multiple-symbol tutorial texts improved

}

Interesting and fun game.
I found a bug: Devil and the Details, level 2...

This is very clever - we originally thought the only way was a (more complex) solution in which you use R1 to destroy R2 to stop the metronome, but this works too. The level will now end as soon as R1 reaches the exit safely. Good find, thank you!

* When I am programming, I'd rather have a menu (horizontal or vertical) open just by the program element I've clicked on...
* Scrolling the mouse should move through programming commands...
* Please put the description of the command in the tool-tip...
* Having a 'cancel' command (to leave command as it was previously) would be nice...
* Push the command tool-tip up if it would go off the bottom of the screen...
* When playing a level, if I restart it, I can't work out how to re-read the instructions
* Perhaps point this out more clearly in the tutorials...
* 1-4 as short-cuts to the programming groups, please...

Done.

* I found the continual flickering of the interface quite distracting...
* The scrolling code window draws my attention while I'm playing.

The interface flickers slightly less now, and much less when the streamline option is checked. The symbol box also appears over the code scroller, hiding it from view.

* Quitting a level should at least give me the option to go back to the main menu or go back to the contracts screen in the campaign I am in.

Sadly very difficult! We might take a (another) shot at this but everything broke horribly last time we tried. The menu builds itself dynamically as you open folders, so going backwards from another place is... just, horrible.

* The button-group lights might be improved if they had a progress bar (or multiple lights) underneath them that light up as each button is pressed. Not too important though.
* Clicking on one of a robot group entries on the map, should switch to that program on the left.
* I got a bit confused by hold buttons being upside-down toggle buttons. 'T' works for Toggle, but upside-down-T for Hold doesn't work for me. 'H' instead?

Not implemented, because:
* Counting total switches as progress suggests the switches-on state is more important than switches-off or mixed states - also difficult to make this consistent across levels with different numbers of switches
* We prefer the total separation between the interface and the grid; this is otherwise a good idea, but it muddles the idea of remote control a little
* A little far-fetched, but T and ⊥ are the logical symbols for tautology and contradiction, so we pretty much have to keep them in a robot game.

Thanks again for your help - if you have any more ideas, let us know.

The same goes for anyone else who might like to give the game a spin. You guys have already made this game a whole lot better than it first was. Thank you, TIGSource!

[Spooner]

Glad my suggestions were useful to you (and good that you dumped some of them; proves you can think for yourselves ).

The "streamlined" button entry is great and really reduces my mouse-miles The flickering is still pretty irritating, but I'll shut up about it

A note on usability of the command menus (streamlined or not): Please don't push all the available buttons to one end, but always place them in consistent positions. As well as recognising the icon, it is important that I can quickly go where I expect the icon to be and not have it in unexpected locations, based on the individual map. This is the reason that Word's "remove rarely used menu items" is an abysmal usability option, even if, on the face of it, it seems to be simplifying things for people! Also important that left/right commands are always horizontally adjacent in both vertical and horizontal versions of the menu.

[HiVE]

The available symbols already do have static positions (both within the box and on-screen, since the box position doesn't change), but the box itself scales to not display rows with nothing in them. We left in the option to have the box always display full-size even when many of the symbols weren't present, with the instruction to apply it if anyone suggested they preferred it (we were 50/50 on it ourselves) - so does this mean you'd prefer the symbol box to be a constant size regardless of how many symbols it actually contains?

The left/right suggestion is valid too, we'll update the order to put them adjacent in both boxes. Good point.

[Spooner]

Ah, OK, I didn't realise that the levels I checked just happened to have only the icons at one end available. I was mistakenly thinking that it was packing all the available icons down - sorry! I can't see any real problem with the box shrinking if it doesn't need to be full size.

This, however, sort of opens another can of worms, though. That is, in bringing out the new version, all the levels I unlocked (2 tutorials and part of one main campaign) were locked again, so I could only look at a very few levels without investing time re-running trivial levels. Perhaps a way to unlock levels, or an option allow me to run locked levels, while in beta (er, can be manually editing a config file; just as long as it is easier than spending several hours running through the low levels in order to test the later ones). Not sure what the standard practice for this is, though.

[HiVE]

Good point - we'll add a line to the .ini file to unlock all levels if the user wishes. Technically it's out of beta... and clearly, totally bug-free... hmm. Something like that, anyway.