Menus, Interface, Information Areas.

[Drabus]

I know you're well into development of an area where you can see all your workers, what they are all assigned to, and the ability to change them right then and there.
That is a darn excellent plan. It's a great idea. I've thought of a couple extra areas to get extra information as well.

Colony Status:
The current status of your colony as a whole.
Includes:
-Number of colonists
-Number of prisoners
-Number of beds for both types
-Current Food Growth per X time (I know it's not consistent)
-Food consumption per X time
-Current Air Consumption
-Current Air production
-More?

Colony History:
Basically a Status but over long period of time. Statistics
In the past Week/Season/Year/In the entire time of your colony
-Colonists/Beds/Walls/Doors
-Total Air/food/mining produced
-Number of trades completed/contacted
-Etc

Military Status:
-Draft time of soldiers?
-Number of invasions repelled
-Number of prisoners caught/killed from invasions
-Current roster of weapons

Random Quality-of-life improvements, such as
-Escape closes windows as well as your current left click

-Panic buttons, for All-colonists perform certain action. Such as
     -Assign weapons to colonists (they can stay on the racks) Hitting the "Arm yourselves!" panic button would get everyone to grab their assigned weapons (or weapon-type so that if one is closer, they get that, eg you have 3 M16's and can assign 3 to them) for incoming invasion
     -Mass waypoint. Get everyone to certain location. OR be able to command multiple people at same time when it comes to invasions and tactical
     -Mass construction - You just built a lot of stuff, and you want all/selected people to make construction top priority until it is finished.
     -Other thoughts

[Tynan]

Back when the game was Starship Architect,it actually had a stats page (the code is still in there). I took it out just so I wouldn't have to maintain it while I worked on the rest of the game, because I had it categorized as nonessential "you can play without this". But from the beginning I've always had the intent of offering summary information like this.

To me the most interesting ideas are the history tracking ones, because they help people tell stories about their colonies. You can see on your food production graph where the crop blight hit you and people starved, and where you finally found that trader who saved you. It's all about storytelling, ya know?

So in general, yes, I definitely want a stats page, but it's something I'm leaving fallow for now just because there are more pressing concerns.

The other thing is that it's good to design this kind of interface last after you know what stats you're trying to express. If you do it first you have to change it every time the rest of the game changes, which it does often. Doing it last saves you time overall.

Anyway, thanks!

[Spike]

Arise, chicken!  Had a thought about the UI, and didn't want to start a new thread if there was an old one with info.

So, was watching another Blitzkriegsler video of a more advanced colony.  He started talking about plans to update the power generation, and was doing math to figure out a rough estimate of the current usage...

I like the idea of a colony status type screen.  Some thoughts would be power generated, max power used (everything on), current power usage (as currently toggled on/off).  Also food stocks vs food consumed, and most of the other things that Drabus already listed.  I can understand holding off on it; not sure if the game status has changed enough for it to be worth implementing.

[SpaceEatingTrex]

So in general, yes, I definitely want a stats page, but it's something I'm leaving fallow for now just because there are more pressing concerns.

The other thing is that it's good to design this kind of interface last after you know what stats you're trying to express. If you do it first you have to change it every time the rest of the game changes, which it does often. Doing it last saves you time overall.

It sounds like Tynan is already on top of things here and planning including stats pages in some future build. That's good, because it seems like they would add a lot to the experience. However, if it's better to build stats displays after we've decided what stats are important, would it be helpful to come up with a list of meaningful stats people would like to see?

I think there are two main scopes to this: overall colony stats, and individual colonist stats. The former should help give depth to the overall story arc, while the latter would give a lot more detail to the characters - which are usually the most important part of any story.