Some of these ideas are from Mark Shute’s excellent usability study from a few months back, while some are new on my part. The main problems the current rough layout pose to my mind are:

• No clear starting point. You’re just supposed to know that you start by clicking on the slot selection drop-down, in the middle of the far-right side of the app. In Western writing, obviously, you go from the left to the right, top to bottom, so this placement is way off where you would expect something important to go. To address this, I’ve consolidated both the slot and set drop-down boxes into a “Add New Item” button in the top left portion of the screen. Clicking on this would bring up first the slot-selection menu (Head, Headgear, Body, ItemRight, etc), then the set-selection menu (Standard, Blades, etc.). Once you’ve chosen a set, you get the grid of black and white items at the bottom so you can pick a specific item.
• Difficulty knowing which item you’re currently working on, and knowing what all is on your character. Just below the “Add New Item” button is a scrolling list of all the items currently on the canvas that make up your character. Clicking on any one of these items will make that item current, bringing up its colors and transformations and other item-specific information. Ideally you’d be able to relayer items by dragging them up and down this list. Viewing the character in this list fashion should make it very easy to know exactly what you are dealing with at any given time. This was Mark’s suggestion and I think it’s brilliant.
• Not obvious that you can click on items in the canvas area directly to select them. I noticed this particularly when sitting down with younger kids to design characters, and when talking with the UGO staff on the very first iteration of this technology (I think it was the Zombie mini, actually). I happened to mention I was clicking on an item and they were all like “You can do that?” I’ve addressed this by placing any tool that can directly affect the character, from basic selection to scaling and rotating and moving, to the bar just to the right of the “Add New Item” button. Depending on which of these is currently selected, making an item current (or adding a new one to the canvas) will result in a selection box appearing around it. This will immediately reinforce which item is current. If the Rotate tool is active, grabbing any one of the eight selection handles will allow you to rotate the item. If scaling is active, dragging a handle will scale it. And so on.
• Too many buttons. Having all those buttons in the current layout between the canvas area and the ad was a bit confusing. There are an awful lot of them, some of which are for universal controls (like printing or help), while others were item-specific (coloring hair and skin). At Mark’s suggestion, separating these functions out into more specific areas should help ease confusion. For instance, making just one “Color” tab instead of three, and moving the color-centered controls (like the paint brush and the Color All Skin/Hair) there would make more sense.

There’s a lot more “under the hood work” to be addressed as well, naturally, but before I start coding I want to make sure I have the layout and user interface nailed, or as close as I can get, anyway.

I’m eager to hear your thoughts on all this, please let me know what you think, if this promises to be better or worse, obvious pitfalls you see, etc. Thanks!

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I also hid tomorrow’s SOD in the Companions-Standard set somewhere, but if you don’t want a spoiler don’t go hunting.

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Holler if there’s something you had hoped for but don’t see. This does include the set of updated Monster bits from HM2, with the centaur(s), tree trunk, spider, faun, etc. I also included some requests from the Aliens thread with the ghost bottom, twister bottom, etc. I also cheated a bit and stole some elements from Insignia and Companions to make more half-human, half-animal hybrids possible beyond just centaurs.

Hope you like ‘em.

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Holler if those aren’t right, it turns out doing cat legs is hard on a human scale.

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If you are having trouble seeing the preview, they are a banded metal regular guy; big hulking monster muscle guy; lobster guy; rocky earth elemental type; stylized dwarf; the guy who used to be in Male Toons (that set is now gone); regular guy with no interior muscle lines; thin adolescent body; fat bastard; gorilla man; lizard man; and hairy regular guy.

This is an interim release, as I wanted to get your feedback mid-stream as to whether these are worthwhile or not. In the meantime I’ll be doing these same twelve without the hands or feet, then breaking out the arms and legs separately as well. Depending on the size of the file, I may then add some additional limbs that aren’t part of these twelve bodies at the end (like the merman tail, the ghost tails, etc.), or those may be put into a separate set, I haven’t decided for sure yet.

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In addition to the piece-parts broken out from these complete figures, of course, there will be other distinct arms or legs or torsos or bottoms (like ghost tails, mermaid tails, etc.) that aren’t part of a bigger set.

How does that sound? Useful, not useful, good, bad, indifferent? Here are the first two samples to give you an idea what I am talking about (the ghosted-out images in the background are the standard male figure, for reference):

I’ll also probably put in a couple of regular-looking human bodies like a dedicated dwarf and an adolescent. The key thing to remember is that I am not — repeat NOT — redrawing any of the clothing items to fit on any of these. If you can Transform them to make them fit, great, but I am not redrawing everything to fit a dozen different styles.

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Speaking of which, here is a quick peek at some of the new stuff:

Let me know in the comments if there are glaring omissions you’d like to see, bugs you find, or anything else that strikes you about the new release. Once this gets squared away, I’ll probably go ahead and do the Bodies. I haven’t yet decided to do just one big release with everything in it, or something like MaleBodyTorsos, MaleBodyArms, MaleBodyLegs, FemaleBodyTorsos, FemaleBodyArms, FemaleBodyLegs, etc. It’s that old trade-off between too many options in a menu and too many items in a set.

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The set is a mix of completely finished heads (like in Heads-Animals) and pieces that you can assemble with the “multiples” setting enabled for your own custom creation. I’ve also imported some alien-like items from Ears, Noses, and Mouths, along with some of the non-proprietary Lordi items you’ve not had til now. All in all this release has 58 items in it, out of which maybe 15 or so are repeats. I thought it was worth it to have similar items all in together.

Here’s a quick sneak preview of twelve of the new items at the top, and at the bottom are similar items from HeroMachine 2 for comparison’s sake:

Finally, in the course of basic testing I ended up putting together an entire character, which I hardly ever do any more. But since it does have one of the new Alien Head pieces (the lion-like snout), and since people for some reason (or hundreds of millions of reasons) want to build cat-like aliens, I decided to include it. Apologies to all the people who do waaaaay better putting these together than I do!

Let me know anything you’d like to see but don’t, bugs, or things you like in the comments.

And no, I haven’t 100% decided what to do next, so by all means feel free to lobby.

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In the meantime, to get the shoe on the other foot (ha ha! See what I did there? GENIUS!), use the “Multiples” setting and the “Flip” function.

Here’s one page of samples to whet your appetite:

Note that I tried something different with this release, putting in feet in different “poses” as well as varying the angle of the foot in different items. I don’t know if that’s going to work or not, but my hope is that it will allow you more flexibility in designing the layout of the character.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. Hope you like the new stuff!

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Many thanks to the folks who posted requests and suggestions in the last thread, they were very helpful. I wasn’t able to use them all, but you should recognize quite a few from that list. Here are a couple of previews:

As you can see, some of these items are complete unto themselves, so you can just plop them right on her head, while others are pieces meant to be used together via the “Multiples” toggle. I tried to get a good cross section of styles and lengths, including some inspired by Anime.

Here’s a quickie sample I did showing two different hair items layered one on top of the head, and the other behind both the head and the body, to give you a multi-dimensional look:

Note that I also put the ears on different layers, so her left ear on top to make it look like her hair is tucked behind it, while her right ear is covered. Layering can give you some really nice effects.

Hope you like the new stuff! Let me know in the comments if you see any particularly egregious omissions or errors.

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