Skin

[bazooka44]

Hello! Is there any chance the college version will have a light skin for it? The dark skin in the pro game is really difficult to look at during longer session, at least for me.

[awbell3]

I'd like to second that. No offense, guys, but I find the dark skin to be difficult to look at. The light skin from 21 was much better. Maybe add a display option for those who want something different?

[brooks_piggott]

We're keeping the dark theme in place to be consistent with the other products. There are no plans at the moment to support multiple designs or toggles. There are skins that were developed previously that may help if you want to tweak items.

viewtopic.php?f=285&t=33616&p=228024&hilit=theme#p228024

[Gary Gorski]

Although we cannot change the UI in this version I am interested in getting your feedback for the future. If you guys could send me a PM with what is difficult I will take that into consideration for the future

[drummerJ99]

Although we cannot change the UI in this version I am interested in getting your feedback for the future. If you guys could send me a PM with what is difficult I will take that into consideration for the future

As someone who tracks my dynasties alot with pictures of boxscores and what not, white works much better than black. But the best of both worlds would be to give us the option to freely switch back and forth like OOTP or FHM.

[awbell3]

Although we cannot change the UI in this version I am interested in getting your feedback for the future. If you guys could send me a PM with what is difficult I will take that into consideration for the future

Honestly Gary, my issues could be completely age related, but it is enough that I prefer to play 21 than 22 (both pro and college versions). The smaller the font and the darker the background, the harder it is for me to see for any prolonged period. Lighter backgrounds with dark lettering are easier to see than the other way around. The same thing with font size, which I noticed is smaller in 22 than in 21...at least in the league stats section. If skin options could be a part of future versions, that could accommodate people's preference, age related or not.

[bazooka44]

Looking at light letters with dark backgrounds is always extremely difficult for me. Whenever I spend an hour or more in the Pro Football version, it causes headache and makes it hard to adjust back to standard light background/dark letters combination when reading reading an article or writing in Google Docs.

If you could make light skin an option in future versions, that would be awesome.

[Colly]

Sorry if this sounds ranty, I'm trying to be constructive because I love the basis of this franchise.

I originally purchased pro22 but returned it pronto due to the white text. But then had to buy it again because pro22 is just better than pro21.

Now I have to play short sessions ( 20 mins max) as the dark skin and white text give me headaches. At least give your users a choice. The fonts are too small too. Actually, the UI in general is abysmal.

The only reason I persist with the games is there are just no good alternatives. These games are really good but could be so much better and I think are not endeared to a broader audience due to abysmal UI and lack of depth of any real RPG immersion. They seem purely targeted toward simmers. that's just too niche. The core mechanics are great. The graphical elements are more than adequate (FM still uses its 2D dots because there's a huge core of folks who love it). I think there's just a lack of immersive gameplay preventing these games from reaching their potential (The basketball version does a better job but it is still not deep enough). Take a look at the immersive nature of Football Manager for clues. I could list almost 2 dozen YouTubers who make a living playing FM. ALL of them play immersive career-style RPG.

Please, please, please just copy FM (or even OOTP) for UI tips. There are just too many cases where you need to go from screen to screen multiple times to get relevant information that should be on one screen. Have you heard of "right-click" or tooltips style info windows? Perhaps look at Paradox for tips on how to use this in your UI. Overall the UX is painful because the UI is so bad.

Again, sorry this comes across as ranting. I still love your games.

[brooks_piggott]

The user does have a choice... we provided a skinning feature a while ago so folks could customize to suit their needs. However, we switched to the dark theme because overall the feedback was darker themes were preferable by a majority of folks.

If you have ideas on how better to present information that we show let us know and we still may have time to make adjustments. We do try and balance how much data we show on various screens since the more we put on the screen the smaller the font and the longer it takes to render. But we're always open to making changes.

And yes, we use tooltips all over the UI to display help or additional popup information on players and coaches. We don't use right click since it's not typically discoverable by users... it's possible in the future we could use it for some shortcuts but it's not a focus for me at the moment.

Regarding "simmers" as a focus... the only difference in the game between someone who "sims" versus someone who "plays" is running a team in human owned mode and clicking "Play Game" to play the games out. The rest of the UI is used by both types of gamers. "Simmers" still need to manage rosters, create custom playbooks, look at stats, scout players, read news articles, etc. So the bulk of the items we've added in for CF22 are tailored for all players, not just one camp or the other. But again, if you have ideas on how to improve on things feel free to post them up and we'll take a look. That's why we do the First Access period and welcome the feedback.

[Colly]

The user does have a choice... we provided a skinning feature a while ago so folks could customize to suit their needs. However, we switched to the dark theme because overall the feedback was darker themes were preferable by a majority of folks.

If you have ideas on how better to present information that we show let us know and we still may have time to make adjustments. We do try and balance how much data we show on various screens since the more we put on the screen the smaller the font and the longer it takes to render. But we're always open to making changes.

And yes, we use tooltips all over the UI to display help or additional popup information on players and coaches. We don't use right click since it's not typically discoverable by users... it's possible in the future we could use it for some shortcuts but it's not a focus for me at the moment.

Regarding "simmers" as a focus... the only difference in the game between someone who "sims" versus someone who "plays" is running a team in human owned mode and clicking "Play Game" to play the games out. The rest of the UI is used by both types of gamers. "Simmers" still need to manage rosters, create custom playbooks, look at stats, scout players, read news articles, etc. So the bulk of the items we've added in for CF22 are tailored for all players, not just one camp or the other. But again, if you have ideas on how to improve on things feel free to post them up and we'll take a look. That's why we do the First Access period and welcome the feedback.

Thanks for the detailed response. As I said, sorry I was ranting. I'd just lost a 7 game year save due to a corrupted save file - lost power right as the game was saving and it screwed my file. Once the power came back and I discovered the result I just ranted. Still love the games though.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the new version. Immersion can always be better, regardless, I've no problems getting immersed in your games. I'll need to explore more regarding skin customizing. Yes, the dark skins look cool but white text on black is not an easy read for long sessions. I think I'd argue with your comment regarding right-clicking. It's a standard convention used in almost every application and has been for years. I'd suggest many folks don't need to discover it, they probably already tried to do it. I know I did.

I think once I'm playing the new version I will put together a constructive post for UI/UX feedback just based on my experiences and thoughts as I'm playing a save.

Looking forward to the steam release soon.