Bought, and it will be interesting to see if the issues I had with the UI has been reworked...
Pretty much liveblogging my first impressions:
* Soundtrack caught me off guard... I was expecting chip music from the look of the game...
* Accidentally pressed shift which revealed keyboard shortcuts... very nice.
* Argh, first UI issue within 2 seconds: Point mouse cursor at door, can't activate... again, the reason is that I need to point at the
bottom half of the door since it's (very) pseudo 3D... not good and closed doors should be an exception, imo.
EDIT: Ok, I see the problem when the floor behind the door is visible, but how often do you want to move to the square behind the door without opening it next? I mean, the constant tool-tips would warm about what would happen anyway... but perhaps a better solution would be to have a special case for doors which don't have the room visible behind them yet. I mean, there is no such problem with doors which are drawn from the side, so it's still a case of inconsistent UI behavior.
* All monsters seem to hover up and down... I get that it's an easy way of making them pop, but this is a rogue-like of sorts... makes me wonder how an actual levitation animation looks?
* HP is just a number... it looks like there should be room for a small life bar to the right of it, which I think wouldn't be out of place in this UI, and would increase accessibility and readability.
EDIT: Ok, after playing I while I get why there is no bar... however, there could be one, if you calculate percentages from where the last "maximum" HP was 100%... still think that could work.
* The sound effect of an opening door suddenly played and a room became visible... if I would have had sound off, this would have been confusing as there is no flavor text for it (ie. "monsters breaking down the door" or something).
* I'm really missing a 3x size of the window... the step between 2x and fullscreen is way to large.
* The space bar seemingly does nothing? I would have expected it to at least to a "skip go" action (which is what I would have liked).
* Ok,
major UI gripe still present: An item drops. I hover the cursor over the item, it just says "move". I click on it to move, and A) my cursor is no longer hovering above the item, which means that the tooltip is gone and worse B) without moving my cursor even the item is gone! Major, major UI break, imo. Also, very costly if you do a keystroke analysis on the action sequence you need to perform in order to just move and pick up an item. This hasn't been fixed and I'm very disappointed.
I mean, it's so easily solvable by adding a move-and-pick-up command.
* Fullscreen is not OS X Lion mission control compatible.
* Also, fullscreen isn't really fullscreen as there are huge, blue borders (at least in OS X). Imo, you really should scale up the graphics by any means in order to full the entire screen in fullscreen mode, or just skip that mode entirely.
EDIT: I'm still updating, but in case people are wondering why I'm nitpicking on the UI... that's part of my professional job, AND this is after all a rogue-like which is designed to have the ease of access UI as one of its strongest selling points...
OK, that's it for today. I had fun, and there seems to be more scenarios, and I bet more monsters and items and other variations to provide lasting value, but nearly no improvement in UI since the earlier demos which is a hurdle, I think.
Also, I had to stop because my eyes hurt from squinting so much. 3x, 4x scaler and fullscreen scaler is simply a must, and again, the game should be intelligent about it (if, for example, 4x scaler doesn't fit the current resolution).
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