Feedback, UI clunkiness

[Baby Blind]

Game is great so far, I have a few issues when it comes to UI but I'm loving the game. Combat feels good and the maps so far looks nice. The character art is nice and consistent, biggest gripes are UI related.

Some feedback UI related is:

Main Menu:
1. Load Game option, when I mess up a chapter I click on Restart Chapter , which makes me go through the previous chapter cutscene. It isn't a problem but kind of annoying when I want to be able to load into the camp UI the moment I fail a chapter and want to restart.

2. Option to showcase save file what difficulty: I might just be dumb, but I don't recall what level of difficulty I put for the game, it be nice when you load a chapter, it it says what difficulty in a smaller subtext below chapter:
i.e:
Chapter 6: The Hands that Feeds
Normal Difficulty

Camp UI Screen:
1. Forge : When forging, it's annoying having to re-equip my old weapon to take out refinements, to put into my new weapons. Is it possible to have a method or way to see all weapons (and a small character portrait on the weapon to showcase who currently has the weapon equipped)

2. Shop: Buy confirmation, I have accidentally bought a few items clicking too fast which resulted me in having too many equipment I have to sell for half price or restarting the chapter entirely, a simple buy confirmation would be nice (Or even a toggle to enable/disable buy confirmations)

3. Character Info Screen: There's a lot of dead space inbetween the character list and the potraits. It would be nice to have a quick display/overview of the unit if I hover over them or maybe even have the character combat sprite next to character icon to fill in the empty space. Also having a wrapper around the character list as it does look a little awkward the sliding bar when scrolling up/down the character list.

Addition:
Character Legacy Info: Also would be nice to have an extra page on units to showcase historic data in a play through thus far. How many enemies fought, strongest enemies slain, # of times going down, highest damage in a single turn, etc. Just a small thing I like in other similar games I've seen.

[eturulja]

Thanks for the feedback @Baby Blind! I agree with a lot of what you put down, I've learned a lot from this first go at making a game UI. Reducing inputs is something I will be looking out for in the future. If not in this title definitely in future ones.

Main Menu:
1. A "restart battle" chapter would help alleviate this issue. Just basically takes you back to the first turn of the chapter. Right now you can press ENTER/Return to skip all scenes to make it a bit quicker, but it'd still take about 10-15 seconds to get back in battle which I know can be irritating when it feels like it's unnecessary.
2. Great suggestion. Should probably show all the chose settings (permadeath/growth type/difficulty).

Camp UI:
1. Yes, great suggestion. Right now that entire flow is a bit unnecessary. If I were to do it again, I'd have all character portraits scrollable on the screen, and you could simply toggle through the forge, shop, and inventory screens. Unselecting a character would show all items in the forge like you mentioned, with maybe a portrait coming up as you hover over an item.

2. Yeah I was thinking a "refund" button would help with this issue. So refunding the last item whether it was a buy or sell would solve this issue.

3. Agreed, mostly addressed this in point 1, but I think this screen should really just be merged with the actual forge/unit info/shop UIs. No need for the extra clicking that this step entails. In hindsight I should have done "Manage" button -> Immediately first unit is selected, all units are shown in a clickable/scrollable list (could be left hand side still), and the selected unit's inventory is open. From there you can press hotkeys/click to go to forge/shop/unit info so everything at most takes 2 button clicks. Definitely learned a lot from the feedback given in the base UI portions. Don't know if I'll be able to make substantial changes like that for this game, but something to learn for future iterations for sure.

Legacy info is a very nice touch too.

Going through I think I agree with just about all your points. They would improve the game for sure. I don't know how many I'll actually be able to get to in the existing roadmap, but they're all something I'm going to be keeping in mind in any future UI designs at the least. So thank you for taking the time to write down your thoughts, it's super helpful!