Ok, as someone who's pretty new to UFO:AI but knows a little about Game design and usability I've got a few observations about the game here that should be useful. At least they're supposed to be useful.
Tutorials:
- How many are there? Clicking on the "gameplay" one doesn't do anything. Is it a title or a tutorial? If it's a title it shouldn't be in the exact same font and style as the tutorial directly below it.
- They need some controls. As it seems to be a video it might help to have something like video controls: Faster, slower, stop, pause, play. As it is at present it's worse than useless because I have to go at your pace not my own.
Options screen:
- Bug - The "difficulty" option has nothing next to it except a couple of arrows.
- "unnamed" as a player name should begin with a capital U.
- Tooltips - there are no tooltips for anything on the options pages that I can see. It's for these things that tooltips are most useful.
Misc:
- All numbers should have a comma (or whatever your local delimiter is) to make it more readable. 4,000,000 is much easier to read than 4000000.
- The text all looks a little mis-aligned. most of it looks like it's poorly Vertically aligned (horizonally it's fine). Some points are too high and some are too low.
- The font you are using isn't a particularly good one. The bottoms of the letters aren't all at the same level. I.e. the t and the r both start at different places. This makes it look like words are un-level (otherwise I wouldn't have noticed it
)
-Tooltips - they aren't large enough for the text they contain, so the text spills out of them (to the right and to the bottom).
- Buttons should be greyed out if they cannot be used. This applies to the "continue" button in the "singlplayer" selection screen if you're not played before and the "transfer" button on base screen when you have no other bases to transfer to,
- My mouse lags a noticably when I go to the research and buy/sell equipment screens (may be others but I'm not bothering to check them all). It's not CPU usage (UFO:AI isn't even using 10% of my CPU) so I'm guessing some code is very inefficient somewhere.
Ufopedia:
- Bug - When I go to the aircraft entry I get the "Dropship" which contains double-layered text.
- When I click on the text of an article it goes to the next article. I guess this is a feature. But if I rapidly click it doesn't rapidly go through articles, it seems to miss clicks and it's very inconsistant in how it does this. Also it;s not at all clear whether this clicking is taking me forward or backward. it certainly doesn't keep you within the same category - it seems random which doesn't make any sense.
- The title of the article (i.e. 9mm pistol) should also show the category you're within. This will aid the user in navigation of the Ufopedia.
- When I click a "topic" from the content page it immediatly takes me to the first article in that category rather than page showing all the articles in that category. Again, not easy to navigate.
- What are "fixcosts" as shown next to buildings in the UFOpedia? Is this Build Cost?
I suppose I should go and report a load of those as bugs over at sf.net
