The amount of clicks it takes to select your two weapons with the old UI was two. The amount of clicks to change your weapons with the new UI? Also two. There's no real change there. It's still probably faster due to the images being more condensed.

Same can be said for scrolls. Most people have a go-to scroll which they use on the majority of turns, so having a pre-selected scroll is a big help. The time required to change scrolls is about the same as it would have taken to click on the scroll you wanted to use under the old UI.

I understand that the visual aspect is a big change in regards to the scrolls and the potions. I also had my scrolls in a pre-determined order and knew where everything was. But it didn't take me long at all to get accustomed to the drop-down list.

I keep my healer scroll in the first slot now. Meaning I have to switch my scroll selection every time I want to use something else. For me, that's not that big of a deal.

The problem with giving potions and scrolls their own boxes is... if someone has a ton of either equipped. Can you image 40 boxes for scrolls and then 50 for potions? It'd be a disaster.

After a quick discussion with , two changes will be made in the coming days. First, the scroll color will be added to the text in the dropdown list for scrolls, to help those with visual cues. And second, the greying out of weapons will be dealt with, so users can see the weapons better :)

Potions are a different matter, as color isn't necessarily helpful when it comes to those. That's a trickier fix. We're working on something for those.

many revisions :) This is just the very first draft! I care and am thinking over everything being brought up. I'll be doing my best to refine it (and the battle game in general) into the best it can be!

Will respond more tomorrow, as I am quite exhausted right now.

Hey everyone, I know told you yesterday about the compromises we were going to implement (like the background color on the scroll selections) but after reading through it sounds like more discussion is needed as a lot of people are saying that wouldn't help. So I'm holding off on making those changes for now. He will be here later to read and respond to everything, and hopefully figure out where to take it from here :)

As the battle admin, will be the main one discussing things and making decisions from here on out. He'll be talking with me to figure out what's possible to do with coding and so I can implement suggestions once we get a better consensus of where we want to go with this.

When suggesting improvements, please keep in mind that we're a bit limited with what we can do on the current layout with the current battle code. The code that handles battle logic is extremely intermeshed with the code that generates the interface, and we also don't have any way to respond to mobile views.

Eventually I would like to make battling its own full-page app (like the wardrobe) so that there is more screen space to work with, as well as mobile responsiveness. But that requires a much deeper rework of the code that handles battle logic itself, so it's something that will happen over time.

We wanted to push out the initial change first because we want to make a very significant change to the battle UI, and that wasn't up for debate. The old interface had to go. From here on out, the process will be closer to what you describe. The UI changes in this update are just an initial draft - far from final. There will be discussion going on in this thread to decide where to take it from here. But the old UI is not coming back, we wanted to divorce from it completely.

It's okay if you disagree with how we made this change. We did talk about announcing the changes beforehand, and we had our reasons we decided against doing so in this case. One big reason was that we really wanted to get this project moving. If we discussed everything with users first, I think it would have resulted in a lot of suggestions building off of the old UI, whereas we really wanted to wipe it and start with a different idea entirely. In the end, we'd still have to make changes that upset some people.

We did base the things in this update off of concerns and suggestions mentioned in the suggestions and ideas forums.

I completely understand feeling strongly about it, and it's okay to feel negative about the changes too. You've brought up some great, useful points to consider and I appreciate that. And I definitely appreciate how respectful you've been while bringing them up :) I haven't taken offense to things you've said at all. I only feel hurt when people are rude or make me feel like I'm being yelled at, which hasn't happened too much in this thread I'm happy to say. I just want everyone to understand that we are listening (there's just a lot of different people and opinions to consider) and that all of this, we're doing it for you.

Yes. In due time, and it's clear there is a LOT of work to be done before it will be ready, but I'm eager to give battling the attention it deserves. has shown me some of those plans that you are referring to and we're excited about bringing battle to the point where we can make them happen.

Thank you everyone for the patience and the feedback so far! :)

Just quoting this too because I love it. This is a really good way to think about the battle UI. I think, during our redesign, we focused too much on the idea that most of battling is very grind-y (like doing BQs and throwback challengers and so on) and ended up sacrificing a lot of the more engaging aspects of the UI while trying to make it less tedious to grind. I welcome suggestions on how to bring that back while still making the daily BQ grind (and other grinds, like... jelly war, anyone?) less painful to go through.

I was just brainstorming that actually :D

Like, we can have the streamlined version be if you click a button that says "Quick fight" or something. And otherwise, you have a different battle interface which is more involved and shows all of the images. The more involved interface would also show weapon details (maybe on hover), so you don't need to constantly look up what each item does.

I'm now brainstorming something from that angle, which I think was really helpful to think about. For a more engagement-oriented battle interface, I'm actually thinking a lot about something like the way Pokemon battles work, where you rapidly move between different selection screens to make your choice, then watch the turn play out, and then go back to the selection screens.

I'm also thinking of adding some effects like animating health bar changes just to make it more immersive and visual, and other more superficial/aesthetic changes like that.

All suggestions are welcome :)

I've gone through and read every (yes every... you guys post too much xD) post. I'm going to sit down and have a talk with about things that can and cannot be done. We will get back to you soon about what's going to happen next!

Two small changes have been pushed. First, the scrolling for the battle commentary has been removed (making it easier to see the damage/healing amounts etc). And the weapons that are not selected are no longer greyed out!

As always, more to come.

Yes. I was at a loss for placeholders, so I asked the Invisible Man if he'd like to help out. He normally spends a lot of time helping people with treasure chests, so he was intrigued at getting to visit the Battle Coliseum for a change!

Anyway, I'm ready to implement the next iteration, which will:

1. Bring back images for scrolls and potions - I am hoping to implement a selection box for these much like the weapons one. Basically, a compact form of what we used to have. They won't need the extra boxes telling you what is selected since you can only select one, not two. And the item names will go under the pictures for each item. What will be different from the old layout is that they are not going to be radio buttons/check boxes, instead it will be similar to the new weapon selection that puts the border around what you select.

2. Return to full-width battle screen.

3. When you hover/select an item, there will be somewhere on the screen that gives you the details of that item: what icons and how many of each icon it does, if it has a chance to bless/freeze/curse, if it's once per battle, etc. All that information you'd otherwise have to go to subetalodge to look up, I want it to be available during the battle to help you strategize.

4. Don't freak out, but I want to try this thing where you click a button to go from the commentary to the move selection. Please, please don't freak out though. I know this is a big change from what you're used to, but it's something that works very perfectly well in other games that have battle, and it would definitely improve the engagement aspect in my opinion. Let me explain, using some terrible whiteboard sketches I made of my envisioned interface. The rationale behind this was the realization that my thought process before was mistaken. The goal shouldn't be to make the grind-y thing less tedious, but to make battle in general less grind-y! I hope doing something like this will encourage players to engage more with the game itself.

Okay, here we go. First off, here's the basic skeleton I have for the battle screen:

That blank space at the bottom is going to be where the commentary and weapon selection goes. So far, it's close to what we had before the change as it returns to a one-column layout.

Now here's the part that changes. Basically, I want that bottom screen to alternate between weapon selection and commentary. That is to say:

1. You enter the battle and select your weapons. Click the button that says "Make your move"
2. Then that area changes to commentary, with all of your icons, battle text, damage/healing, etc. There's a button maybe that says "Continue" or something. When you click that...
3. It changes back to the weapon selection form, where you can plan out your next move once again. And then click Make Your Move again.
4. Then back to commentary which tells you the results of that move. And so on and so forth.

I'm hoping that this will encourage users to engage with the battle text and the actual strategy component, though of course, easier opponents will always be a bit of a grind just because they're below your level. Important note: The page will actually have both of these elements on it, so it will be possible to show both with customCSS if you do not want to be forced to click a button to switch to the next page.

This is the commentary screen. In essence, it's the first half of the page you used to see all the time. No huge changes here.

This is the weapon screen. Well, the top of it, anyway. If we take a closer look at just the item selection part, I'm hoping to make a more compact view by doing something like this:

Basically, the weapons are on the left side, and the potions/scrolls are on the right side. Doing this will give each option a bit more room while not making it so you have to scroll down a ton to see everything. In fact, giving weapons that much more space means I can add the item names under each weapon in the box too, including stolen weapons so you don't have to guess-and-check with those.

The header at the top of each screen (which are the parts that say "Battle Commentary" and "Do your things" or whatever I wrote on my whiteboard sketch) might double as a button. This is an idea I had but I'm concerned about someone accidentally clicking it. But if I do have that be a button in itself, then it eliminates the need to scroll down to make your move if you wanna grind through things with the preselections.

Speaking of preselections. I can make this something you choose on a per-battle basis. That is, before you enter the battle, along with the pet and weapon sets you can also choose to check a box that says "Turn on preselection for this battle" and it will use preselected weapons for that battle only. So yeah, tell me what you think about this as well as having the header be a button on its own.

Thanks for all the feedback (though it's been quite time-consuming to read haha) and I hope you like my thoughts about the next design iteration.

Oh and one last thing: I am in agreement that potions and scrolls should both stack, and this will certainly happen in the final layout. As always I appreciate your patience :)

We've made a couple of big changes regarding the new UI!

• Scrolls and potions now have scrollable images to select from!
• The auto-selection of weapons is now a toggle-able effect! There is an option on the pre-battle page, where you select a pet/weapon set/scroll set. And it will remember what you selected! Hoorah!
• A minor change of the battle page pre-scrolling past the header, to reduce scrolling!

Will update the first post to reflect these changes.

I'm fixing it now, sit tight.

All should be fixed now :) Go check it out.

Reminder of what was changed. Terribly sorry about the bump in the road we had there.

Okay just for you I'll clock in again and figure out how to put scroll preselection back. Sit tight. :P

[edit] By "you" I was referring to the many people who posted how they want it back, not going to ping you all lol.

Scroll preselection has been added back.

Also I found the cause of the bug you experienced and it too should be fixed.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It's something I completely overlooked - I didn't realize it deselects your scroll set when your pet doesn't have enough AP.

I think a good solution would to make it work the same way the weapons do: It gives you the warning that you don't have enough AP to use it, but it's still selected. Just like how your weapon set will warn you you're not high tier enough to use it, but still selected (that's how it works now, right? I haven't double-checked, just basing this on what you said.)

Please don't feel like everything you do is wrong! You pointed out something important that I completely didn't notice, I appreciate that.

Hi everyone. Regarding the suggestion: Move total damage/healing to the top of the commentary text.

I've been trying to figure this out for a while now. The code that generates the commentary is extremely convoluted so this is way trickier than you (or I) would expect.

However, no one told me that gelatin wars usually expect users to keep track of their damage dealt by themselves. So now that I know that, I completely understand how necessary this is to get working in some form, and it's increased a lot in priority.

I'm now thinking about how I can implement a quick, temporary solution, maybe involving calculating it backwards in the JavaScript or something, by parsing the commentary. (As ridiculous as that sounds, it would be easier to do that than actually deal with the backend code that generates it.) I have a couple other ideas. And it will probably end with the total damage/healing being repeated at the top and bottom but I don't think anyone minds that.

I'm hoping to get something figured out for this by tomorrow, so please be patient and know that it's being worked on.

While I have your attention, I want to ask something. Right now, the left-hand side of the screen remains where you scroll it to. For example, if you scroll it to the bottom and make a turn, it stays scrolled to the bottom. Should I change this to scroll back at the top automatically after you make a turn?

[edit] With further thought, I'm going to make it scroll back up to the top after each turn, but I will make this change after I move the total damage/healing to the top as well somehow so that those relying on this at the moment can still do so.

Please read this entire post.

I've made a Hydragellos Damage Counter page. It will not be officially announced (via news post) and it will also not be officially linked from any page onsite. This is because this is not a permanent feature to be kept for future battle events, it's just a page I made for our current battle event for your convenience.

The way this page works: You will see a list of pet names. Click on a pet's name to request the calculation. You get one check, per pet, every 12 hours. When you get your total, that number is then cached for 12 hours afterwards, and will NOT be recalculated until those 12 hours are up. This timer is per pet, not per user. If you check before your 12 hours are up, you will see the cached total with a note telling you it's a cached value. You'll also see what time it was from. Clicking the pet name before the 12 hours are up will NOT reset the wait time so don't worry about checking it!

If you see a "No battles found" error for your pet, don't panic! Just do another battle and the page should be working correctly again.

If the page timeouts for you (such as 502/504 error) or otherwise you experience a page-breaking error, please let me know as soon as possible. If the page does break for you, I cannot guarantee that any total displayed by it afterwards will be accurate. At the least, you need to tell me so I can reset it for your pet. If you are reporting an error, please let me know 1) your pet's name (or ID number) and 2) what total the page displays for it.

If you're going to use this page, don't wait until the last day of the event to do so. The 12-hour wait should be enough to enforce that it isn't used too often for the servers to handle. If you are going to battle a lot and plan to use this, please check it every so often rather than only checking once at the end of the event. It will be better for the servers because it splits up the work.

I don't think it's likely that this will break the site, but if it does, it will be taken down. If that happens, please don't complain about it on this thread at least because I'll feel really bad.

Remember you only get one check every 12 hours so you may not want to check it right this minute. Here is a link to the page, enjoy.

Lol no no anxiety!!! Yes, if you click the pet again, it will show you the cached value and when the time started. For example, this is my pet:

It does NOT reset your 12 hours to do that! So don't worry about clicking on the pet name before the 12 hours are up.

Making this an admin post so people notice it, in case it wasn't clear in my post above.

Quick update regarding my post earlier in the day (quoted in the spoiler for context)

I won't actually have this done by tomorrow as I said I would. When I said that, it was cuz I thought I'd spend the rest of the day working on it. But then []'s post convinced me to at least look at the Hydragellos thing so I did that instead, and ended up working on it all night.

Moving the total damage/healing is not as high a priority now, so I can't say when I'll do it, but it's still on my to-do list so no need to worry.