Here are some things that come to mind:

The [Schedule] menu is not available by "D" hotkey on Girls screen if a girl portrait is not shown. Ren'Py hotkey action is done instead. Prefer to get schedule, with girl 1 in focus (top of screen).

If going from selected girl on Girls menu to "D" schedule, prefer that selected girl be visible or centered on schedule screen. Often is off-screen currently with large number of girls.

Cannot currently get from Girls screen to Classes with going thru Quests part of postings, which often resets selected girl. Could use a direct hotkey for Classes, as I often try to find a class for a selected girl.

Response screen of girl's message for sending girl on class/quest seems to pass-thru clicks to background objects (non-modal), for example can switch to next girl accidentally.

I echo the bad visibility of things like active Load Game/Save Game indication, & support black font for active, or reverse video.

Hi Goldo,

I'm a little late to the party, but here's the things about the UI I struggle with the most. In both cases, it's somewhat of a problem of scale. It works okay as long as you have only a few girls, but becomes cumbersome later on, when you have 20+ girls.

1) Work Schedule

At first, managing the timetable is not a big problem. Let's say you have two girls and want to make Wednesday a day of rest, and one girl is working full shift, the other half-shift. I have to click once on Girl A's "Full Shift" - Button and twice on Girl B's "Half-Shift" button. (Full -> Rest -> Half -> Full -> ...)

Three clicks, not so bad. However, if you have 20 girls, three clicks turns into thirty, just for declaring one day a day of rest - and once again if you later decide that an additional day of rest is no longer necessary.

There's quite a few factors in BK that make you re-evaluate your schedule. E.g. you could want to set one of your girls to work only half-shift, because
*) she got the "Warm Welcome" resting bonus
*) your tavern / onsen / etc. is too small for two full-time girls, so you alternate them between full-shift and half-shift

The resting requirements also change - as your girls work more customers, they need more energy, with some furniture, they need less energy. Bisexual (less energy-draining) and group.(more energy-draining) also play a big role.

Ideas:
*) Make it possible to set a certain weekday for all girls to some value with one click
*) Make it possible to set all weekdays for one girl with one click
*) Have a few slots where you can "save/load" your schedule
*) Honorary Mention: Auto-Rest helps. I often unlock the autorest-feature quite late, though, if at all. It requires handing quite a few artifacts to Gina. I think I usually have at least 12 girls before I unlock it. It seems to depend a lot on luck.
(Warning: If there were any changes recently, I might have missed them)

2) Items

There's an even bigger difference between early-game and late-game here. Early game, it's a big event when you can afford your first "Fine Dress" for a whopping 1000+ gold. So you buy the dress, then go to your girl and equip the dress. Awesome! Also, not so bad in the UI, and you cannot afford more than a few items per week, anyway. (if even that)

In the lategame, things are different. Let's go with 20 girls again for the example. Each has 5 slots. 20 * 5 = 100 slots to manage.

It gets worse because I cannot remember for 20 girls who has equipped what in each slot. So I go to the shop at the start of the week (new items), and need to switch back and forth between the girls and the shop, to check if an item is useful or not.

Actually, later on you need to switch between your girls and multiple shops (weapon shop, dress shop, ring shop, merchant shop).

There's also clutter later on, because more and more items become semi-unusable. If I'm earning 30k per day, all the cheap items are basically completely uninteresting to me.
(I feel like this has gotten better compared to 0.15, though. I don't have reliable data on this last point, just gut feeling)


Ideas:
*) Seamstress : Allow the upgrading of items worn by your girls by the simple click of a button.
*) Bring the girls and the shop(s) together. Either by seeing in the girl items screen what the various shops have to offer for a slot right now, or by seeing in the shops what a certain girl is wearing right now. Ideally, remove the need to hop between 2 screens altogether to buy and equip an item. (or unequip/sell it)
*) Filter - be able to hide all items below a certain cost or level in the shop. Would also help filter Makibishi once they've become useless
*) Mention: All girls have a "Misc" slot (on top of Body, Finger, etc.). I don't think I've ever found an item I could equip in the Misc slot.
*) Mention: The "Main" Shop needs to be upgraded, while the other shops just offer you quality items "for free". I feel like the upgrade cost later on becomes too high, and sometimes just stop going to the main shop altogether, since the likelyhood of finding something useful gets ever smaller.
I feel like either the upgrade cost should be lower, or there should be some advantage to upgrading the Main Shop.

One more thing : It would be nice to add "Enable all" and "Disable all" to the girl mix screen. If you have a lot of mixes, doing that manually can take quite some time.

Quote from: DougTheC on Nov 09, 2022, 01:53 AMThe [Schedule] menu is not available by "D" hotkey on Girls screen if a girl portrait is not shown. Ren'Py hotkey action is done instead. Prefer to get schedule, with girl 1 in focus (top of screen).

Okay sure, but here's another idea: How about focusing Girl #1 on the girls' screen automatically if no girl is selected? I didn't do it because I wanted people to have a chance to admire the bedroom background, but I admit this is faulty reasoning...

QuoteIf going from selected girl on Girls menu to "D" schedule, prefer that selected girl be visible or centered on schedule screen. Often is off-screen currently with large number of girls.

Adjusting viewports, my favorite UI nightmare... ^^
Fine, I'll do it. You owe me a cookie. 

QuoteI echo the bad visibility of things like active Load Game/Save Game indication, & support black font for active, or reverse video.

Reverse video? What do you mean by that?

Quote from: Ch12 on Nov 09, 2022, 02:31 AM1) Work Schedule

*) Have a few slots where you can "save/load" your schedule

Most likely I'll do that. It used to be possible to reverse-cycle the schedule buttons by right clicking, but I think I disabled that because it wasn't consistent with the way right clicks were used throughout the game.

Quote2) Items

Ideas:
*) Seamstress : Allow the upgrading of items worn by your girls by the simple click of a button.
*) Bring the girls and the shop(s) together. Either by seeing in the girl items screen what the various shops have to offer for a slot right now, or by seeing in the shops what a certain girl is wearing right now. Ideally, remove the need to hop between 2 screens altogether to buy and equip an item. (or unequip/sell it)
*) Filter - be able to hide all items below a certain cost or level in the shop. Would also help filter Makibishi once they've become useless
*) Mention: All girls have a "Misc" slot (on top of Body, Finger, etc.). I don't think I've ever found an item I could equip in the Misc slot.
*) Mention: The "Main" Shop needs to be upgraded, while the other shops just offer you quality items "for free". I feel like the upgrade cost later on becomes too high, and sometimes just stop going to the main shop altogether, since the likelyhood of finding something useful gets ever smaller.
I feel like either the upgrade cost should be lower, or there should be some advantage to upgrading the Main Shop.

Okay I will look into it, but no promises: item management is a chunky part of the screens, and what you are requesting is quite a large overhaul.

Regarding implementation effort and items. I think the seamstress idea would be the most easy to implement. For instance, it could be a drag/drop zone that upgrades/replaces an item with a better version.

It might have some impact on game balance, though, since high-grade items would become more readily available. I think this can be resolved with the cost, though.
E.g. if upgrading costs as much as buying the item in the first place, you still have an incentive to buy new items - since the shop would give you the same item for the same price, but without essentially destroying the one you already have.

Anyway, no pressure, it's all just ideas and suggestions.

Quote from: Ch12 on Nov 15, 2022, 04:41 AMRegarding implementation effort and items. I think the seamstress idea would be the most easy to implement. For instance, it could be a drag/drop zone that upgrades/replaces an item with a better version.

It might have some impact on game balance, though, since high-grade items would become more readily available. I think this can be resolved with the cost, though.
E.g. if upgrading costs as much as buying the item in the first place, you still have an incentive to buy new items - since the shop would give you the same item for the same price, but without essentially destroying the one you already have.

Anyway, no pressure, it's all just ideas and suggestions.

Yes, I like that idea but I think it doesn't properly address all your points. And I do feel like I need a more generic inventory system. So I might go down that hole after all... And then we know who to blame when 0.3 doesn't come out before 2023.

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On a separate note, I wanted to open up a discussion on girls skills, specifically the UI's skill bars.

I have gotten better at bars and styles recently (after only a few years of tinkering blindly...), so I have the following ambitions:
- Have bars with clear separators marking the 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250 lines (giving a better idea of a girl's rank at first glance)
- Have multicolored bars reflecting effects: orange for the base value, green for item bonuses, red for negative modifiers
- Here is where it gets tricky: In order for the multicolored bars to work, I will need to change how the stats are presented.

Full nerdy explanation below:

Spoiler

Currently, the minimum/maximum displayed on the bar and in the text is the net value once all modifiers are accounted for.

So a rank 1 girl with a +5 bonus will have a skill maximum of 55 and a skill minimum of 5. The skill text will display X/55.
The same girl with another skill with a -10 bonus will have a skill maximum of 40 and a skill minimum of 0 (because skills cannot go negative). The skill text will display X/40.

There are side effects though:
- Since the maximum is changing, a girl with the same value X in both skills will have two bars of different length.
- There is no visual indication that a skill is boosted or gimped, unless you read the fine print

What I mean to change is to always display the rank maximum as the skill maximum (in that case 50), and thus display both skills that way (assuming they are maxed): 55/50, 40/50.

But bear with me: the way the game actually calculates the bar size will be different for bonuses and maluses:
- For bonuses: Just like now, the bar will grow to accomodate the extra bonus (so the full bar will have a maximum '55' in the case of the first example skill with a +5 bonus). The +5 bonus will be indicated with a green bar 'on top of' the orange bar. As stated above, I will not show this new maximum in the accompanying text, only use it to calculate the bar size.
- For maluses: Unlike now, the bar maximum will remain at 50. But a red bar will display the size of the malus (-10), on top of the orange one. This will show the skill visually stuck at -10 under the rank maximum.

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So, while I think this system will be more visual and gamers should be familiar with it, I still have a couple of unresolved issues:

• What should I display for a girl that has a skill malus when her skill is inferior to the malus value? Let's take a girl with a -10 malus and a skill value of 0. If I show a skill of 0 and a red bar worth -10, it gives the impression that she has a skill of 10 and an equivalent malus. But if I just show zero, we don't have a visual indication that she has a -10 malus. And for obvious reasons, I don't want the UI bar to go in negative territory and leave the confines of the screen...
• Because of the discrepancy between calculating maximums for skills with bonuses and regular skills, skills with the same values may still display differently. This will be noticeable in the case of large bonuses. For instance a girl with a skill of 25 and a +25 bonus (50 skill in total) will display a shorter bar (50/(50+25)=67%) than a girl with a skill of 35 and no bonus (35/50 = 70%). In addition, I'm not sure what to do about the separators for every 50 step: should I add new ones when the bonus goes beyond the rank maximum, and won't that scale weirdly?
• Because all status effects are 'netted', a girl with both a positive and a negative modifier may show a smaller net bonus/malus effect, or even nothing (if the modifiers cancel each other out). Is this misleading?

And finally: Are there other problems that may arise from this approach?

You won't believe how headache-inducing it is to display a simple skill bar until you try your hand at it... 

Had to make it visual to wrap my head around it. Let me know if I've interpreted anything incorrectly.

Current bars:

Spoiler

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Goldo's concept:

Spoiler

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My first suggestion would be: I want an on-hover screen like you get with traits, which gives you a list of bonuses and maluses that are affecting the skill you're hovering on. I would consider that a remedy for headache #1 and #3 (well, not really... but imo it's close enough)
For #2 I thought: "Don't the separators deal with that?" And I tried to see what adding more, smaller, separators would look like... Doesn't look great if I'm honest - it looked better in my head.

Spoiler

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Alternatively, you could also scale the width of all bars based on the bar with the largest value. To my mind that makes the most sense (ofc. it would still need the 50/100/150/200/250 separator lines)

Spoiler

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Hey neronero, thanks for the great visualizations! I think mockups go a long way when designing new UI elements.

Goldo, I feel like you have to be really careful with this. In the worst case, this might even end up being distracting.

A girl can have bonuses/maluses for multiple skills. I can imagine cases where a mixture of gear, perks and traits leaves a girl with modifiers for every single one of her skills. In such cases, the skills area might turn into a confusing kaleidoscope of colors.
I recommend making this subtle. Neronero's last mockup shows how this could work for the malus case.
(I would probably make it even more subtle. In contrast, in Neronero's middle mockup, the strong red color makes the total bar look longer than it is.)


I would put emphasis on this mainly when the skill is being focused. Let's say the user hovers over a specific bar - that's when imagine seeing the color visualization as an additional information I want to process. E.g. you could activate or emphasize the colors only when the mouse pointer hovers over the skills area.
(The on-hover screen neronero suggested is a very hot contender for providing additional information about a skill.)


Also, I really think you should leave the (maximum) text as it is. In my head, the bonus/malus is more tied to the maximum of the skill than the actual value.
Let's say a newbie waitress girl has only 5 base charisma, but due to gear has a +40 bonus on her charisma.
Right now, she would show as "45 / 90" , making it clear there's a lot of room for growth.
On the other hand, showing "45 / 50" makes it seem like she's practically maxed - even though she only has 5 "real" charisma.

Try to keep in mind what the information is the user needs in a specific situation, and try to present it as cleanly and summarized as possible. It's totally fine to aggregate some information, if it provides focus.
E.g. one alternative might be showing "5 / 50 (+40)" but that makes the text longer, and bombards the user with even more numbers. You even have to do the calculation for the 45 value by hand.
Personally, I don't think having all this information at your fingertips all the time is a plus. (And that's actually kinda how you handle it right now. You show the green (+40) only in a text area at the top when you hover over the skill.)

In general, thinking about edge cases is useful for coming up with solutions for parts where you're undecided.


Finally, I think special consideration should be given to the energy bar. For energy, percentages are more important than for the other bars. Also, the maximum is very dynamic, since it is tied to constitution. Personally, I would leave the energy bar as it is, I think colors would only distract from what's important here.

Quote from: GoldoAnd then we know who to blame when 0.3 doesn't come out before 2023.

Curses, it all was a trap from the very start.

Quote from: neronero on Nov 15, 2022, 08:08 PMHad to make it visual to wrap my head around it. Let me know if I've interpreted anything incorrectly.

Current bars:

Spoiler

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Goldo's concept:

Spoiler

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Thank you, the mock-ups are great! They are exactly what I had in mind.

QuoteMy first suggestion would be: I want an on-hover screen like you get with traits, which gives you a list of bonuses and maluses that are affecting the skill you're hovering on. I would consider that a remedy for headache #1 and #3 (well, not really... but imo it's close enough)

Of course it would be great, but unfortunately it requires revamping the way all of the effects are dealt with in-game to make them fully traceable. I'm not going to go there just now.

QuoteFor #2 I thought: "Don't the separators deal with that?" And I tried to see what adding more, smaller, separators would look like... Doesn't look great if I'm honest - it looked better in my head.

Spoiler

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Yup, that's what I found out too. It looked good in my head, but...

QuoteAlternatively, you could also scale the width of all bars based on the bar with the largest value. To my mind that makes the most sense (ofc. it would still need the 50/100/150/200/250 separator lines)

Spoiler

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I think it would be a bit awkward because of energy, which is usually a higher number than all other skills, so the bar for all of them would be reduced, which I'm not sure is good in the end for the readability of the UI.

QuoteGoldo, I feel like you have to be really careful with this. In the worst case, this might even end up being distracting. A girl can have bonuses/maluses for multiple skills. I can imagine cases where a mixture of gear, perks and traits leaves a girl with modifiers for every single one of her skills. In such cases, the skills area might turn into a confusing kaleidoscope of colors.

Yeah, I feel you. I could add an on/off switch in the options somewhere (but I'd rather get it right in the first place...).


Here is what the current implementation looks like:

Spoiler

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On the one hand, I do find it useful in practice, like for instance when browsing the slave market, you can immediately get a feel for what kind of traits a girl has.

On the other hand, with a lot of bonuses, it does become noticeably worse (although maybe not as bad as you might think):

Spoiler

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(don't mind the energy bar, it's acting up)

QuoteI would put emphasis on this mainly when the skill is being focused. Let's say the user hovers over a specific bar - that's when imagine seeing the color visualization as an additional information I want to process. E.g. you could activate or emphasize the colors only when the mouse pointer hovers over the skills area.
(The on-hover screen neronero suggested is a very hot contender for providing additional information about a skill.)

I like this idea. I still want to give a hint without hovering though (maybe with a light color filter), so that you can still get the information at first glance if you're looking for it.

QuoteAlso, I really think you should leave the (maximum) text as it is. In my head, the bonus/malus is more tied to the maximum of the skill than the actual value.
Let's say a newbie waitress girl has only 5 base charisma, but due to gear has a +40 bonus on her charisma.
Right now, she would show as "45 / 90" , making it clear there's a lot of room for growth.
On the other hand, showing "45 / 50" makes it seem like she's practically maxed - even though she only has 5 "real" charisma.

Okay, that makes sense. What is more problematic in my opinion is negative modifiers, because if I show "40/40" but the bar goes to 50 with a 10 long red bar at the end it seems a bit counter-intuitive (but at this point I'm as confused as anyone else, really).

QuoteFinally, I think special consideration should be given to the energy bar. For energy, percentages are more important than for the other bars. Also, the maximum is very dynamic, since it is tied to constitution. Personally, I would leave the energy bar as it is, I think colors would only distract from what's important here.

Oh boy, I don't think you're going to be happy with what I did with it... (see screenshots above)

QuoteCurses, it all was a trap from the very start.

You'd be happy to know that my OCD does not allow me to overlook your suggestion, so I have already started working on the new inventory system. 

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 18, 2022, 11:24 PM

Spoiler

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(don't mind the energy bar, it's acting up)

Ooo, dat look gud! I like it more than I thought I would (although I agree with Chris, making it subtle will make it even better)

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 18, 2022, 11:24 PM

QuoteAlso, I really think you should leave the (maximum) text as it is. In my head, the bonus/malus is more tied to the maximum of the skill than the actual value.
Let's say a newbie waitress girl has only 5 base charisma, but due to gear has a +40 bonus on her charisma.
Right now, she would show as "45 / 90" , making it clear there's a lot of room for growth.
On the other hand, showing "45 / 50" makes it seem like she's practically maxed - even though she only has 5 "real" charisma.

Okay, that makes sense. What is more problematic in my opinion is negative modifiers, because if I show "40/40" but the bar goes to 50 with a 10 long red bar at the end it seems a bit counter-intuitive (but at this point I'm as confused as anyone else, really).

If a full bar is expected to mean "max value for this rank", and on top of that the repetitively-listed number might not be accurate due to bonuses/maluses, then you might as well de-clutter the UI not list that max value at all.

I would prefer the old max-values since it contains more useful information, but make the max-value number red-ish if it's reduced by a net-malus and green-ish if it's inflated by a net-bonus

Here's kind of what I have in mind:



Thoughts:

• The bars are more subtle, especially the red ones. Picking a good balance between "subtle" and "unnoticable" isn't easy, though. This is my personal sweet spot during editing, but might be that perception during actual gameplay is different.
  
• Anyway, I think this concept works out pretty well also for the 40/40 case. You can see both that the bar "is full", and why the value is only 40.
  
• For the text, I tried coloring the max value instead of the actual value. I'm a bit divided about the usefulness. Personally, I would turn this into a "hover-only" part. Maybe not only the coloring, but even the whole text. You could try making the whole skill area "hover", and not treat the bars individually, but show the detailed stuff for all bars as soon as you hover over the general area.
  
• If you go the hover route, I think you could then make the colors more noticable during that time, like in the earlier mockup.
  

Regarding the energy bar, it sure looks fancy, but I think it might be easier on the eye to just pick one color depending on the value.

E.g. if the girl's at full health, the whole bar is green, if she's close to collapsing, the whole bar is red. And in between, you pick a shade between the two, as if picking the color from your mockup at that point.

If you need help with the color arithmetics, let me know, it's can be more tricky than you would think.

Just an idea, though. I think I'd have to give your energy bar a try "for real" to be able to tell if it is distracting during gameplay or not.

EDIT: Regarding separators (50/100/150) I'm also not a fan. As your girls advance through the ranks, more and more dividers will overload the bars. If you do add separators, I would prefer only a few percentage-based. (25% / 50% / 75%) But to be honest, I think they would still be clutter - just less, well, cluttery.

Thanks, there are a couple of technical issues with the hover route, but I will try to implement that. After thinking it through, I agree with keeping the maximums as before and using color-coding to indicate that they are raised/reduced.

As for the energy bar color, it matches the one in girls' portraits on the right hand side, and after testing it for a while I think it's not that bad. I think introducing a new color coding for energy that's different from the one in girls' portraits might detract from the user's experience rather than add to it.

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By the way, I've worked a lot on the UI in the past couple of weeks and here's a quick and non-exhaustive change list to let you know what's coming:
- A Moon icon in the top overlay with the effect shown upon hovering
- Support for wide resolutions such as 1920x1080 on all game screens (some events may still look weird, to be ironed out progressively)
- Completely revamped inventory system allowing direct transactions from girl to girl and girl to shop, and auto-filtering of equipable items when selecting an inventory slot
- Single custom screen for sending girls to the Farm
- Manual filter of night log using free text input (such as "waitress" or "boa")
- Tooltips that now automatically fit the tooltip area and never overflow
- Colored bars with skill bonuses/maluses. Handles on all the bars that can change value
- Clear background contrast on selected buttons (such as save/load buttons)
- Better performance on all screens showing items
- Not UI, but the whole game has been ported to Renpy 8.0.1 and Python 3
- and more.

I am working next on the hover effect for skill bars discussed above, and then on improving the night screens (especially the right-hand side reports). After that, there's still a good chunk of the story to be written, but I think I will probably release a test version before the story is fully finished to get feedback.

PS: Anyone knows how to do that?

All right, new question for you guys: What kind of extra information would you like to have during the night's event screens (directly on the right hand side, or in tooltips)?

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 28, 2022, 10:21 PM- Support for wide resolutions such as 1920x1080 on all game screens (some events may still look weird, to be ironed out progressively)

This would really elevate the game as it would get rid of the rather poor RenPy image downscaling applied to girl packs.
Will it work for other 16:9 ratios like 2560x1440?