Enemy Hints/Lore System

[Melth]

I want one of my current maps to have a way for the player to learn what abilities enemy units have

I also intend the map to have a detailed story and setting which interested players can dig into and piece together if they want to.


Now I've made a system for this which works well enough, but I'm wondering about ways to either improve the interface or the way the information is presented.

Currently the way it works is that if you left-click the same enemy unit twice in less than 0.5 seconds, you get messages like the two following examples:

Besides wanting the formatting and color scheme to be intuitive and helpful, I'm also thinking about some of the following things:

1) Is double-clicking the best way to bring this stuff up? An alternative would be to have the player press Escape while they have a unit selected instead of double-clicking it, for example

2) What is a good way to display the lore where people who are interested can see it easily, but it doesn't get in the way of people who aren't?
I could do something like have a -loreon or -loreoff command that determines whether that paragraph is shown at all. Or something like a triple-click displays lore. Or Escape does lore while double-click just does mechanics or vice-versa

 

[Cheshire]

you could always just have an "info" tab on the top (the quests button and you change the text) with all the info there. The system you have now is also pretty nice.

here are a bunch of other opinions:

Ways to Display Info About Enemy Unit Types

I'm working on a singleplayer, RPG-esque map in which most of the difficulty comes from the spells and abilities rather than the raw stats of the enemy units. The trouble is that that's inherently somewhat beginner-unfriendly. It's easy to just click on an enemy unit to see its raw stats, but...

www.hiveworkshop.com

(I did very hard work of CnP from the links on the bottom...)

 

[Melth]

In terms of using the current system, do you think you as a player would prefer to double click enemies to get this info? Or to select them and then press Esc?

And what would be your preferred way of hiding/displaying the lore section so that it's available conveniently to people who are interested, but hidden from people who are not?

 

[Cheshire]

In terms of using the current system, do you think you as a player would prefer to double click enemies to get this info? Or to select them and then press Esc?

out of those two options I personally think double clicking sounds a lot more intuitive and fluid.

And what would be your preferred way of hiding/displaying the lore section so that it's available conveniently to people who are interested, but hidden from people who are not?

I think that a tab on the top tagged "lore" could do that just fine (like I said above, instead of quests). unless you want it to be more in peoples faces than that. or unless you are currently using all of the built in tabs.

you could have a building or character ("Town Bard" or something like that) that is used to display info. in the map "shadows of tirisfal" there is a character like that (actually a building with a character model I think) in each base that lets you scroll through useful info. not sure if that map is protected but you can definitely look at it to see implementation if you like the idea.