Progressive UI for an hobby game [on hold]

Disclaimer: this is a no-profit game, a prototype I'm doing in free time. My aim is to experiment mechanics and gameplay, before move into more complete experience (graphics, colors), but I want to experiment also on UI and UX too!

Description

In my game "Infiltration" (playable, with more screenshoot there) player take role as ancient god taking over the world.

As "god" player is able to see and use a lot of information about the world and this is major issue (because of information overloading), like:

  • current turn
  • advance/pause turn
  • global power level / awarness level: red and blue globes on left side
  • city position on map
  • city status
  • presence of corrupted agent inside a city
  • basic information about a city, like food value, rebellion value, population, description,etc, the box on right side:

enter image description here

  • in every city there is a list of people you can see stats, second box from right side:

enter image description here

  • every actor panel has a lot of information about stats, guild affiliation, relationship, etc..

  • lower panel display a log for every npc action

Questions

I've tried to use following tecniques to weaken information overload:

  • tooltips everywhere, describing bonus, malus, stats, ecc..
  • on hover change for buttons that are clickable: player can move mouse inside a button and "see" that is clickable in this way
  • icons: my idea is to convert every label for a number in an icon, for example "Attack" stat will be a "sword" icon
  • master/detail panel: as you can see, you start from map, then select a city, then select an Npc inside a city and so on. But this will require a lot of space if I will a new panel, or panels that are not related to this "flow"

Do you have specific suggestions on how to handle organize ui/ux in this case, and let the ui be "progressively" discovered by the user ?

Color will help to identify key elements, like for example change color of clickable elements? Or use a colored border for graphic buttons ?

Bottom log is reported to be a "mess" because is a log for every action in the game every turn, so there is a lot going on. My idea to improve here is to remove useless logs and add a button for every city on top of the log, so user can filter logs for a specific city or maybe split in two logs ?

Tags: