I wanted to ask: would a notification system for stat changes be annoying? I wanted to make one for my game. I know I can program it to be toggeable on or off by the player, but, assuming the player activated it…
Would having it constantly activate be annoying for the user? Almost all choices may change a stat, specially personality ones. For example, having a:
“Your {stat} has increased!”
Normal narration
Eeevery single post-choice screen could get annoying quite fast, wouldn’t it? Or perhaps I’m overthinking this too much? x_x
That’s a really good question. The dodgy answer is probably “It depends”. If this is a setting the player can toggle off during the game if it gets annoying, or toggle on if they are getting curious about how come the MC seems to be having worse results than expected (with a choice on the stats page, perhaps), the player can self-regulate and it should not be intrusive
The way I’ve done it is to have a toggleable notification in the option text, I find that fits together better in my mind. If I have a notification on the next page it’s possible that I’ll have forgotten what the option was that I chose if I took a break from playing.
But in general I’d say go for it in whichever way feels intuitive to you, and good to make it optional as you’re thinking.
I think it would be a bit excessive. Perhaps you could toggle such an option but I don’t think the use would be extremely popular unless it is a stat heavy combat game. (Just my opinion, I could be certainly wrong about this)
I think that this works better, but having the option for some kind of toggle like that is useful because the alternative is just that people who care about that kind of thing do the check stats>make choice>check stats loop every time they make a choice, and that gets old pretty quickly.
i recently played All World Pro Wrestling (id been meaning to for AGES but finally got around to it) and chose to have the stats notifications on. i actually didn’t mind it; i almost think it helped that the setting involving a sport (namely, wrestling), so the stat notifications didn’t feel too much of a break in immersion. just felt like a score going up or down, sort of, felt natural in the world. also i am just a compulsive stat checker anyways, in basically EVERY game, so i loved not having to click back and forth from the stat screen to the main game to check how stats changed with my choices
I see that All World Pro Wrestling has both ‘my system’ of notification after a choice and ‘HarrisPs’s system’ in the option text itself. What’s more, All World Pro Wrestling let’s you know the quantity of the stat increased too so you don’t have to open the stats pages everytime XD I really like it! I was going to go only for the option text one, but seeing All World Pro Wrestling’s code shows me I may even be able to do both and then let the player choose. Yay!
