Loonworks Games

UX/UI Case Study

Powerful Storage Filters

UX/UI Case Study

Powerful Storage Filters

Improving quality of life while adding min/max features for power players.

Improving quality of life while adding min/max features for power players.

While Prospector is not a hardcore logistics game, resource management is a critical component for its design. The game’s experience necessitates players crafting thousands of items and storing them in logical containers. Prospector has an item storage building called a Silo, which supports 36 item slots.

Open the filters menu for a specific silo

Set filters and limits organized by category

Modify from favorites tab for quick updates

Design challenge

Supporting automated item collection while still affording players the ability to organize their resources.

Design challenge

Supporting automated item collection while still affording players the ability to organize their resources.

In the original design, collector bots were snapped onto silos and would collect any item in the same workspace as their parent silo. This worked OK if players only had a single silo inside a Transformer work area, but the experience became a bit of a nightmare after scaling to 2-3 different silos with their own bots collecting and storing items using a first-come, first-served basis.

Solution

Default silos to accept any item, but allow players to filter to specific items for better organization.

Solution

Default silos to accept any item, but allow players to filter to specific items for better organization.

You can also see that item filters themselves are added to larger categories that map to specific use cases players might have for a particular work area. For example, this allows players to quickly decide that a silo is only for storing animal products and makes it easy to toggle all those items at once, which saves them from having to activate 20+ toggles.

Design challenge

Basic and refined crafting items still have value in the late game, but production automation is constantly converting them into other items.

Design challenge

Basic and refined crafting items still have value in the late game, but production automation is constantly converting them into other items.

For example, let’s say the player has a furnace and a sheet press inside the same work zone. If the furnace is set to make infinite plastic bricks while the sheet press is set to make infinite plastic sheets, every single plastic brick will be turned into a sheet when players actually want a certain amount of both.

Solution

Add min/max item limits for silo items so players can maintain a healthy stock of important resources.

Solution

Add min/max item limits for silo items so players can maintain a healthy stock of important resources.

With this update, players could control how many of a resource could be used in automated crafting by setting a minimum limit. In addition, setting a max would prevent a single silo from filling up with a single item.

Going further

Adding filters and min/max values for filtered items was a great quality-of-life improvement for players, but an even better solution would be to set smart filters and item limits based on what items are being crafted via automation in the same work areas as a silo. These ideas were too costly to implement and would have pushed out my release timeline.

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