Post by drummer_nrg in Some suggestions after first offline playthrough

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Thanks for the rapid and thoughtful response, I agree with all of your sentiments.

I am new to this community, I will check out Discord. I wasn’t aware of the survey: were the results published anywhere? Was the survey conducted in Discord? It may bear out a topic here or a web page or a community wiki.

As a product manager, I know that not every customer request is valid, but often reveals a more general need, separate deeper problem, or latent expectation. I think classic M.U.L.E. is a real pinnacle of game design and UI: simpler is better on so many levels! Of course, everything was necessarily resource constrained in the 8-bit days. But messing with the game design could be death of brilliance by a thousand cuts or tweaks, so I appreciate your caution. Perhaps any “enhancements” could be defeatable with a Classic mode.

Some more clarification:

Yes, in multi-player, the discussions that happen during the auctions is critical (and fondly remembered) and not reflected in game play. Perhaps it is my nostalgic recollection that the accelerated timer was faster. So my thoughts are really around modern pacing expectations and in retrospect, perhaps my request is limited to single player only.

One additional thought to address this: perhaps the auction pacing accelerator doesn’t need to be a game play and UI element, but could be a game play setting in Options, perhaps an offline auction timeout acceleration factor?

For all of the skips during the non-human player actions/updates, I struggled on my first play though to find and then later remember which single button on the controller (PS5 Dualsense, turns out it was X) could trigger the other player update skips. Because the Atari joystick back from those days had a single button that triggered these skips, I think a small argument could be made that any of the Playstation face buttons (X, triangle, square, circle) could increase the accessibility of skips in these sections.

For the round summary animation skips (IIRC from the original): this would cancel the animation and just display the final result standings.

Thanks for your consideration.

Is there a priority roadmap list? :)

puzzud209 days ago

A survey link was emailed to then current customers and was advertised on social networks including the World of MULE discord server. I plan on publishing the results but the Roy Glover interview was higher priority. When I do, I'll advertise similarly; instead of an email, I'll make a community post here.

Thanks for the clarification on the speed up ideas. I'll likely supply them without option, relying on the unanimous voting nature we discussed before.

I rather like the simplicity of designing around a single (primary) button, where all other buttons are not essential to the game. And I guess a counter argument would be that a dedicated skip button is not essential. But there is already such a precedent in MULE with using the button "to go on". Did you know you can reconfigure your gamepad settings in the main menu -> options -> input -> gamepad -> customize -> ...

The status summary animation skip is doable. As a product manager, you know how programmers will wince and squirm but eventually implement a feature request. MULE does not distinguish between button just pressed versus button down; it only looks at the latter. There is a use case where players will hold their buttons down during the animation to ensure their scores are hidden from other players when the animation ends. The skip will require that a player raises their button and presses it again. I can think of a couple ways to do this.

I currently don't have a public roadmap list. In my developer logs, I give a general "what's on the horizon".

itch.io

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