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Play Carcassonne Online With Friends

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Quibbble:
Hi all,

We've recently created a web port of our take on the original Carcassonne and would love to get your feedback! It's still in the early stages of development so any thoughts on what we can do to improve the experience would be greatly appreciated. You can check the game out at https://quibbble.com/annex.


Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=5516.0

Bumsakalaka:
Hi. Quibbble. Welcome on forum.
Every new port carcassonne to online / all is fun for all of us.
As somebody who touch programming here is some notes (read it as suggestions)
1. It take time to noticed, how UX is working.
2. Please add event to click on board which will place current tile on selected available place of board.
3. When placing meeple, also it's not good to select small circle and move it to tile and didn't know when it will fall. On road or field or where? So game have 3 major steps
A. Place tile
B. Place wood (figures)
C. Score features.
This has to be clear for player.
So
I. When start game, there is "select team" red or blue, but blue is on turn, but red is first in order.
So on start game, automatically select blue to show current tile.
I know it's designed for mobile so Vertical screen. But when player is playing it on horizontal screen, it's not intuitive.

When placing meeple it will be fine to highlight shape of feature where is pointer on which feature will be meeple placed after end of move it to tile.

When turn is ended, it will be good to automatic change of color.

Rotation placed tile. This feature is missing and is standard that player can turn his tile after placement.

Didn't finish game, due to need.

So, good luck, this can solve some issues when player are lost or make bad placement (confirm is nice).
Imagine scenario
1. Place tile - bad placement? - Remove or turn tile
2. Have meeple to place?
-> 2a) No - Button for confirmation of tile placement
-> 2b) Yes - i) Show button to skip meeple placement
                  ii) Automaticaly on click to unoccupied feature, place free meeple
                    -> when placed show button for confirmation or remove
3. After finish automaticaly change color of player.

This is something you can do for better UX.

Quibbble:
Hey Bumsakalaka,

I really appreciate the detailed response. I agree there is a lot of UX related work to do and many of the actions in their current state are not intuitive. Below are are my responses to your points:

Event to Click: I agree this is a good idea and will see about adding support for this.

Team Selection: I can see about setting your team to the current turn on game start so that the tile shows.

Horizontal Screens: As you said, this was designed with mobile in mind so everything is vertical. Eventually when I have the bandwidth I would like to address this such that there is better support for horizontal screens but for now I am holding off as this is a significant time investment.

Highlighting Shapes on Meeple Place: Agree this would benefit the experience significantly and is on the list of things to add.

Turn End Change Color: The goal for this platform is to play with friends so ideally each person would select a team and then not change teams throughout so I don't know if this is something that should be implemented but am open to feedback.

Tile Rotation: Tiles can be rotated by clicking on the tile that shows up below the board on your turn. This doesn't seem to be clear so I'll see about adding some sort of indicator to let the user know they can click to rotate.

Again really appreciate the feedback! We'll look at your comments more and see about updating the UI with these changes. 

Meepledrone:
Welcome to the forum, Quibble!

I also tried a 2-player game on my desktop PC. It was fun. The UI is clean and minimalistic the same as the tiles and the meeples (circles). Less is more in most cases.

Here are some comments:
* Learning how the UI is not very difficult but dragging and dropping when the elements are tiny can be a challenge. I wasn't sure which is the focus when releasing meeples (circles) and meeples I wanted to place in a small city or a road ended up as farmers in the adjacent field. Some visual cue about where the meeple would land would be great. An undo command in case of error would be great too.
* I didn't have any issues with placing tiles after I learned the head of the arrow is the focal point and not the tile being dragged. An undo command in case of error would be great too.
* The viewport where the board is displayed is small on computer screens. So I had to zoom out to see the board in full and then placing meeples without making mistakes became a challenge, as commented earlier. If you could extend the viewport according to the screen size, it would be great.
* The blue meeples on grey features were a bit difficult  to tell appart.
* The color palette for features black = field, grey = city ir cool but sometimes I had to stop and think since the tiles are so minimalistic you may lose perspective for a second.

Great job!

Bumsakalaka:
Cool. I like it and your's approach to go to the "Hell of Carcassonne" with your's work.
I was checking also you other games, and I can say, that they have same issues for UX which partialy make playing game more difficult.
Automatic change of color is standard approach also when playing with friends on same screen and make game more intuitive, so ok. you turn, do what is required (imagine all other expansions for Carcassonne, with Double turn, Phantom placement, Dragon movement, etc.)
Anyway, I found interesting game you implemented Paths. It's variant of Tsuro?

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