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It’s one of those stories people can turn into whatever conclusion they want: - DF is still a great game, so good UX in games doesn’t mean anything. - DF is s

It’s one of those stories people can turn into whatever conclusion they want: - DF is still a great game, so good UX in games doesn’t mean anything. - DF is still a niche game, so good UX in games is essential. Caveat: I’m a UX designer who absolutely loves DF and is saddened by how many people may never find out how great it is.

Natsu 4y ago
The original DF UI reminds me of vi, both good and bad.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  As a vim lover is it actually bad from a UX perspective? Having a learning curve can be offset by enhanced efficiency right?
  - ericbarrett 4y ago
    It's...pretty bad. (I have thousands of hours in both DF and vim.)
  - LanceH 4y ago
    I'm personally not fond of having a command mode separate from a typing mode. As someone who learned to touch type (on a typewriter) I don't always look at the screen. In vi, if you're typing away while in command mode, all sorts of things can go wrong. The one sin I can't forgive, though, is that he movement keys aren't the same as the home row keys. jkl; would have been so much better. Everything else I'm willing to chalk up to preference -- I prefer the chording of emacs, but I can understand it's not for everyone. To me it feels like vi was written for hunt and peck typists.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      jkl; does make sense, I may try remapping that, though I don't really think about it anymore. I remap jj to esc so I don't have to leave the home row. I dont have to look at the screen unless I'm trying to build a regex for something. I do remember being in the wrong mode a couple times and doing odd things. My only problem with the chording is that my pinky gets tired way faster than my other fingers.
      - LanceH 4y ago
        I would remap, but the major reason for using vi is that I'm hopping onto another machine or docker instance -- then my problem would become propagating my .vimrc file everywhere. So I keep my vi knowledge to plain vanilla on purpose, generally. I may be more suited to chording just because I have very large hands and will use either pinky, or the palm of my hand to hit the control on either side.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Plenty of games do both. You can have buttons with hot keys visible on them. Age of empires is a good example. A total beginner can play just fine while a pro can play at extreme efficiency via hot keys. But most importantly, a beginner can transition in to hot keys gradually as they are very visually obvious.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      super good point, I learned all the shortcuts in excel by using the menus, back when it had menus. The shortcuts still work though the menus are gone. Not sure how someone would learn them now.
  - Agentlien 4y ago
    I love Vim and DF but there is a big difference. Both do things very differently, both are complex and require time to learn. The difference is in consistency. Vim is mostly consistent and that's where its power comes from. Learning the underlying rules is an investment which allows you to intuit most of its functionality. DF is wildly inconsistent and a lot of its difficulty is in learning the quirks of its interface which offer only tedium and no advantages in themselves.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    I mean, I like vi/vim, it just has a big learning curve that's none too helpful, but once you get going it's smooth. DF is like that too, every command is basically a single keystroke. Every menu option has some key assigned. So once you know what you're doing it's not too hard to do a lot of complicated things quickly, but you may have to study to understand what you should even be doing. It's kind of up to you to create the whole fortress from nothing and it's not always clear what you need to do to, say, make soap. You have to set up (and learn) entire production chains for items, get people to do the labor, etc.
AlphaSite 4y ago
I don’t know if those are contradictory, I think great games can succeed despite their UX but a great UX let’s it get a lot further than a bad one.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Dwarf fortress is the result of over a decades work and it’s still not widely played. But most interestingly it’s one of the few games where more people know about it and don’t play it than people who play it. There is huge interest in the game but the barrier is stopping people from playing.
rtpg 4y ago
My defense of the DF "bad UX" is that it is a complex machine, and like with many complex machines you have to read the manual. I played a good amount of DF as a student. Never built things too complex cuz it is hard, but after reading some wikis and playing around with it, I ended up getting it. There is obviously something about how the UX is foreign, and that with other choices it would be more accessible. But I found that the initial hump is the main thing, and that afterwards it's fine? But I am the kind of person who enjoys Dwarf Fortress! It is great when people can design things that are understandable out of the box, but I feel like it is OK to design something that requires a bit of upfront learning, if those different designs are serving purposes. The bad metaphor: it's OK if a bus driver has to take some classes to figure out how to operate a crane.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It’s more than that. The game is not _that_ complex and it doesn’t have to be so hard. It’s also not impossible to have the game walk you through your first playthrough. People don’t want to read a manual before playing a game. They want to see those in game popups pointing out features as they play until they are fully warmed up and can play alone.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  I love DF but its interface is not just different, it is definitely bad. Worse than not following any conventions is that it is deeply inconsistent. It is inconsistent in how it presents the same information in different places, in how you navigate different seemingly similar menus, even in what key is used for the same action across menus. For instance, searching in a list is done with q, S, or f depending on in which menu.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  Most people don't want to do homework before they play a game. Super Mario Bros. is a game that was alien to many of the first people playing it, but people still played it without reading the manual because the game is intuitive at teaching you what to do. A good video game teaches you what to do, it doesn't demand you learn yourself. Then it tests what you've learned through gameplay.
Gigachad 4y ago
Another interesting datapoint is that Rimworld came out which took 25% of the game and put a great UI and in game learning experience in. The game was a massive success. Accessibility matters so much more than feature count for success financially and by popularity.
- langsoul-com 4y ago
  At this point, dramatic changes to ux would alienate the core fanbase that's been supporting dev for a decade. The learning curve itself IS the feature.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    How much would that matter if it also attracted 100x as many new fans?

Natsu 4y ago

The original DF UI reminds me of vi, both good and bad.

galangalalgol 4y ago
As a vim lover is it actually bad from a UX perspective? Having a learning curve can be offset by enhanced efficiency right?
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  It's...pretty bad. (I have thousands of hours in both DF and vim.)
- LanceH 4y ago
  I'm personally not fond of having a command mode separate from a typing mode. As someone who learned to touch type (on a typewriter) I don't always look at the screen. In vi, if you're typing away while in command mode, all sorts of things can go wrong. The one sin I can't forgive, though, is that he movement keys aren't the same as the home row keys. jkl; would have been so much better. Everything else I'm willing to chalk up to preference -- I prefer the chording of emacs, but I can understand it's not for everyone. To me it feels like vi was written for hunt and peck typists.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    jkl; does make sense, I may try remapping that, though I don't really think about it anymore. I remap jj to esc so I don't have to leave the home row. I dont have to look at the screen unless I'm trying to build a regex for something. I do remember being in the wrong mode a couple times and doing odd things. My only problem with the chording is that my pinky gets tired way faster than my other fingers.
    - LanceH 4y ago
      I would remap, but the major reason for using vi is that I'm hopping onto another machine or docker instance -- then my problem would become propagating my .vimrc file everywhere. So I keep my vi knowledge to plain vanilla on purpose, generally. I may be more suited to chording just because I have very large hands and will use either pinky, or the palm of my hand to hit the control on either side.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Plenty of games do both. You can have buttons with hot keys visible on them. Age of empires is a good example. A total beginner can play just fine while a pro can play at extreme efficiency via hot keys. But most importantly, a beginner can transition in to hot keys gradually as they are very visually obvious.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    super good point, I learned all the shortcuts in excel by using the menus, back when it had menus. The shortcuts still work though the menus are gone. Not sure how someone would learn them now.
- Agentlien 4y ago
  I love Vim and DF but there is a big difference. Both do things very differently, both are complex and require time to learn. The difference is in consistency. Vim is mostly consistent and that's where its power comes from. Learning the underlying rules is an investment which allows you to intuit most of its functionality. DF is wildly inconsistent and a lot of its difficulty is in learning the quirks of its interface which offer only tedium and no advantages in themselves.
- Natsu 4y ago
  I mean, I like vi/vim, it just has a big learning curve that's none too helpful, but once you get going it's smooth. DF is like that too, every command is basically a single keystroke. Every menu option has some key assigned. So once you know what you're doing it's not too hard to do a lot of complicated things quickly, but you may have to study to understand what you should even be doing. It's kind of up to you to create the whole fortress from nothing and it's not always clear what you need to do to, say, make soap. You have to set up (and learn) entire production chains for items, get people to do the labor, etc.

AlphaSite 4y ago

I don’t know if those are contradictory, I think great games can succeed despite their UX but a great UX let’s it get a lot further than a bad one.

Gigachad 4y ago
Dwarf fortress is the result of over a decades work and it’s still not widely played. But most interestingly it’s one of the few games where more people know about it and don’t play it than people who play it. There is huge interest in the game but the barrier is stopping people from playing.

rtpg 4y ago

My defense of the DF "bad UX" is that it is a complex machine, and like with many complex machines you have to read the manual. I played a good amount of DF as a student. Never built things too complex cuz it is hard, but after reading some wikis and playing around with it, I ended up getting it. There is obviously something about how the UX is foreign, and that with other choices it would be more accessible. But I found that the initial hump is the main thing, and that afterwards it's fine? But I am the kind of person who enjoys Dwarf Fortress! It is great when people can design things that are understandable out of the box, but I feel like it is OK to design something that requires a bit of upfront learning, if those different designs are serving purposes. The bad metaphor: it's OK if a bus driver has to take some classes to figure out how to operate a crane.

Gigachad 4y ago
It’s more than that. The game is not _that_ complex and it doesn’t have to be so hard. It’s also not impossible to have the game walk you through your first playthrough. People don’t want to read a manual before playing a game. They want to see those in game popups pointing out features as they play until they are fully warmed up and can play alone.
Agentlien 4y ago
I love DF but its interface is not just different, it is definitely bad. Worse than not following any conventions is that it is deeply inconsistent. It is inconsistent in how it presents the same information in different places, in how you navigate different seemingly similar menus, even in what key is used for the same action across menus. For instance, searching in a list is done with q, S, or f depending on in which menu.
alexb_ 4y ago
Most people don't want to do homework before they play a game. Super Mario Bros. is a game that was alien to many of the first people playing it, but people still played it without reading the manual because the game is intuitive at teaching you what to do. A good video game teaches you what to do, it doesn't demand you learn yourself. Then it tests what you've learned through gameplay.

Gigachad 4y ago

Another interesting datapoint is that Rimworld came out which took 25% of the game and put a great UI and in game learning experience in. The game was a massive success. Accessibility matters so much more than feature count for success financially and by popularity.

langsoul-com 4y ago
At this point, dramatic changes to ux would alienate the core fanbase that's been supporting dev for a decade. The learning curve itself IS the feature.
- thfuran 4y ago
  How much would that matter if it also attracted 100x as many new fans?