There’s been in the past a bit of talk of a mobile port for Dungeons of Dredmor but nothing as yet has come of it. Probably due to Dredmor’s engine being fueled by lutefisk, and the UI being rather hostile to changing paradigms. I figure there’s no harm in throwing my hat into the ring and speccing out what a User Interface suitable for ham hands might translate to. Hence I made the following draft. It could be prettier, but I decided to make it on mobile to make a point, and also to ensure that it was at the right scale. For the record, I am completely fine with the Open Dredmor project and/or Gaslamp using this document as a base or reference as long as credit is given. My guiding design philosophies: * One finger usability, for times when the player only has one hand free, e.g. when observing the vista atop the porcelain throne. * Two finger usability, for faster macros when the player has two thumbs available, e.g. when hands are freshly washed. * Less static elements. Gone shall be the days of feathering the mouse over to the pixel below the mana bar to properly space a Noxious Brimstone Flask or Tenebrous Rift. Heaven forbid you try that with your finger. Spoiler: Sorry for the chicken scratch Most of what’s there should be self-evident and I’ll go over some specific features and what I envision the elements doing. Firstly, the Buffs tab has that little arrow because it is collapsible. You can slide that whole resizable area in or out as much as you like and select the JPEGs you want to be visible in what order. No more losing track of the Celestial Aegis counters! The chest icon could maybe be a skills icon and can collapse or expand a view of the belt and hotbar. The six squares at the bottom can resize to fit four or five in a row (expanding your view of the dungeon thus at the cost of smaller room to navigate/more risk of misclick). Using tap to move makes the three top squares pictured redundant, natch. That teal text says Ability/skill/item select, and the green arrows flip between skills or items you put in what I imagine to be a system like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup’s “Quiver” action. Tapping the HP/MP bar lets you wait a turn. The Ability or Skill shown in the box at bottom right can be dragged and dropped onto the dungeon floor to affect something, and like in the PC version the template for the ability highlights to show you where exactly it can go. Minimap is accessed by pressing and holding the player's face, or it could replace one of the UI boxes. In Settings you can choose whether to bring up all the inventory/equipment at once or half, then the other half, of the inventory. With half an inventory you can drag and drop a selected piece of gear/armor onto the Doomguy/Avatar face to equip it, such as in times when you want to raise trapper stats, . With inventory open the blue tabs change function to navigate through the inventory rather than the dungeon. You can use them to move items around, or tap and slide. When holding over an equipment slot on the left, the Inventory boxes change to the stats screen and show a comparison between the two pieces of gear. There probably could be a keyboard-only navigation like in NetHack or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup in place of the icons, and also on PC for that matter, but I wanted bigger buttons. Also, if I decide to, I dunno what it would be keyboardwise, something like Shift+Direction to look or just spinning my finger around on the look arrows, I imagine the player character in the dungeon erupting into the pirouette the Pokemon player character does in the Gen 7 games onwards (aka Charizard Spin iirc) and then doing a Pizza Tower “Strike A Taunt” reference. In a perfect world all the mobs spin too after maybe ten seconds of holding the spin ("there is no need to be upset" vibes), and afterwards they go back to facing their original directions. If you get Dredmor to do the spin he jumpscares the screen immediately after the bit ends, FNAF 2 puppet style. But I digress. Other quality of life improvements: The message log and battle log could maybe be separated. We at least need a way to stack “Your spell does no damage” messages with a running counter (x35). Vending machines should have an icon on the map, and not this bookshelf smilie that taunts me mercilessly. A navigation system would be nice to have as well, to travel to a destination, interrupted by mobs appearing. Autoloot needs to be automatically disabled in the pocket dimension. Female voice lines for crits, you need more mana drink more booze, drink blaht, HAYWIRE, etc. would add additional fun layers of meta, like it’s the PC’s voice in their head narrating their journey.
Your eagerness for this is an opportunity to also do several changes to how certain mechanics work in-game. Maybe we can apply methods which finally eliminate one of the engine's more archaic methods, revolving hard-coding and a critical lack of flexibility with mods and total conversions. These were thought of before when the coders and devs were more active, but sadly vanished when Clockwork Empires was on the works and eventually became too big a hurdle for its creators. I have basic experience with Android Studio and I am willing to learn more about it and/or other ways to collaborate with this initiative. It'd be a great way to help Gaslamp Games with its announced return and the currently processing process (read: Gaslamp Games Twitter), since it's always been an example of what can be accomplished with a dream and a team. Thank you for your post, I really liked it. I could use a mobile draft software to better illustrate your mockups, which do seem comfortable to work with. Maybe also an alternate horizontal layout.
