- Joined
- Mar 7, 2009
- Messages
- 4,488
- Trophies
- 1
- Location
- Pantsuland
- Website
- www.youtube.com
- XP
- 2,948
- Country
Don't double-post and I'm making my reply right now, its just a little long.PokeTrader said:please tel me if im wasting my time. and i will let this post go DEAD.
-edit-
Finished my post. I hope you take my ideas into account:
Leaving aside the minor spelling errors and lacking graphics, your idea of the button map and the layout could have a couple of changes.
Warning: Iron Wall of Text
Generally, I'm expecting people that want to actually use a pokedex app are expecting to get the bigger things fast while leaving the finer details as things to look at after finding out the basics of the pokemon (base stats, type, etc.) and thus I made my layout with its button map.
In comparison, your button map seems frivolous. Of course the title screen makes sense button/touchscreen-wise, but if anything, there are various unneeded items. In my mind, I would expect things that pokemon players would expect to use frequently first:
-PokeDex
-AttackDex
-ItemDex
-BerryDex
-Type Chart
-Options
-Credits
To be frank, I don't really think any other choices would be needed. Egg groups are useful for breeders...but they really need to know what they are attempting to breed in the first place, which would make it a pokemon-specific option, not really something that deserves space on the main menu. Similarly, Maps and "Versions Of Game" don't deserve a slot in my opinion because they just aren't useful for anything unless you are just looking at it for leisure, not something I would expect any pokemon gamer to really care about. Two additional things that I could add to my list would be minigames as well as instructions (or "Help" as you put it), but they aren't things that are bare ESSENTIALS.
Moving onward to your information page, I believe you are dedicating too many button functions to just changing the description and one image. Four buttons out of the DS's 12 is a dreadful price to pay for changing just a description and an image. This isn't to say that the idea of putting in all the descriptions is bad, but it could be implemented in a vastly sleeker way by adding a start menu rather than using the start button just to go back to the main menu (I'll give a list of what I think should be in the main menu later).
Also, the text might be a problem because I think there is a limit to how small of a spacing can be used between the letters and in worst case senario, your top screen would be trashed with letters. On the other hand, I do agree with having a couple of the items that you have on the top screen such as the capture rate, steps to hatch, final experience, and EV's given, but I don't really think Base Happiness should be up there, nor should the fact that it is a Non-Legendary because for the most part, there are a hell of a lot more Non-Legendary than there are legendary. If anything, Legendary should be depicted by something out of the way, but quickly noticeable such as a star or a pokeball in the corner of either the screen or the pokemon sprite.
On to the bottom screen, I like the idea of the tabs (much better idea compared to my selection bar thing), but there are a few things that I could say about that (I'm disregarding the artwork still).
First of all, your moves are really burning up your screen space taking 4 whole slots. It would probably be more cleaner splitting it into learnable moves (level up/egg moves) and teachable moves (TM/HM/Tutor) or just combining all three. A tab you could add would be the Type Advantages which would be a simplified version of the type chart specific for the pokemon.
The button map for this screen is also inconvenient. The D-pad is fairly useless and could be better used to swap between the evolutions of the pokemon or something because going one pokemon at a time just doesn't seem like a great way to go about things (yes I see how you could rely on the Database search if you really need to). At least with changing between evolutions, it provides a quick way for users to make the connection between pokemon that gained evolutions/pre-evolutions in the later series rather than searching for them. Since that only takes two of the D-pad's buttons, the up and down (or left/right) buttons could be used for something equally useful, ie. give users with scratched and bad touch screens the ability to actually use the homebrew by giving them the task of swapping between the tabs.
I think it might be possible to fit the all tabs on one of the sides, though it might not seem apparent because of the size of your icons. This said, the D-pad can't be used as an alternative to the scroll bar unless it were something closer to my original mockup, so as an alternative idea to using the D-pad and to use those two buttons that could have a better use (X and Y), those could be used for scrolling or better yet, use as multifunction buttons in which you could hold Y for example and then use the D-pad for scrolling, and then hold Y and press B for a shortcut into one of the other Dex's (just an example, I don't actually have any idea of what sort of things I would add to a multifunctional button yet).
I'm sure the A button and B button (these could be swapped with the X and Y from the previous idea of scrolling) are also free as well at the moment if I've kept track of what things I would revise correctly. Surprisingly enough, I can't think of another function for them since most things are already covered, provided the keymap I described above were used. Of course, the B button could be used to go back to the Database search or something similar (like a scroll with the pokemon names and numbers similar to the in-game pokedex) just as easily as having a button for the pokemon cry (or you could just have an entire tab dedicated to it...but truthfully I would just have it play the cry once when you select the pokemon if it were my choice since I rarely listen to them)
Anyways, on to a better funtionality of the start button. In most cases, I feel that a start menu is infinitely better than just using it as if it were a B button. The start menu will cover all of the things that may seem to be missing from all the stuff above (such as what happened to the functionality of the four buttons used on the top screen). Currently in my mind for menu options would be:
-Pokemon Database
-Search
-Version
-Region
-Sorting
-Change Dex
-Return to MainMenu
-Cancel
As an explanation for each of the options:
-Pokemon Database would be the main way of moving through the pokemon with a screen that has maybe a scrollbar, the number and name of the pokemon and maybe the type if there is enough space.
-Search would be the pokemon search obviously, complete with all of the possible ways of searching for a pokemon including name, bodytype, weight, height, type, etc. Preferably it would be nicer to split this into Basic Search and Advanced Search.
-Version would serve as what you put your L&R buttons as since users probably won't be swapping this quite as much as something else that could be used in its place.
-Region would be a nice addition to keeping from using too many buttons and is mainly for the Locations screen so users could choose a region (Hoenn, Kanto, Sinnoh, Johto) since I'm fairly certain it would be much less of a hassle if the user didn't have to keep swapping to the correct region when they only have Pokemon Diamond or something.
-Sorting is just an added feature that isn't really needed and is for the Pokemon Database option and how the pokemon are listed (A-Z, by size, by weight, etc.)
-Change Dex is fairly obvious in what it does, it changes from the current Dex to one of the other ones, like the AttackDex, ItemDex, or BerryDex. (Even though you can change to the AttackDex from the this start menu, there should also be the ability to take certain entries from the AttackDex so that the pokemon-specific view can look up the attack without needing to open up the entire AttackDex or lose what pokemon the user is currently looking at)
-Return to Main Menu doesn't need any explanation I'm assuming.
-Cancel is just to close the start menu without doing anything.
Of course, all of the options I listed can be worded different, but this is the wording that I thought matched up and so that is why I used them.
I suppose this goes without saying, but all of this is just my opinion...I really would like a complete PokeDex as well, but without a sensible layout, it might just end up being a hassle for users.
On the other hand, Saviorkross if you like the revisions I made to his idea and think you can do something similar to it, I'm sure a lot of people would be happy xD. Plus there are people more than willing to help with ideas, graphics, as well as information collecting and I'm happy to say I would be glad to help with any of those though my coding skills rival that of a toadstool.
As a sort of afterthought, you should probably work on your spelling and grammar PokeTrader because without those two, most people will probably write off your ideas as worthless or it makes it harder for a person to understand what you are trying to say.