Manual mode needs some love

YGO Omega Suggestions
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I know there’s only one dev, but I wish manual mode was a first class citizen. Its pretty clear that its rarely tested, rarely used.

But I guarantee you that the reason its rarely used is becase its rarely tested. A user will say, “Oh hey they have manual mode”. They’ll use it for 5 minutes until something breaks, and then they’ll never touch it again.

Anyway, here’s a feature that it needs:

  • Drag and drop everywhere
    – I get it, drag and drop was designed for auto mode first. But as a user, the fact that drag and drop only works from your hand is completely arbitrary and makes no sense.
    – I want to click on my ED and drag a card onto the field
    – I want to drag my on-field card to the GY
    – Let me drag my GY cards to my banish zone
    – Let me drag from card list menus
    – Right now, the experience is, “Oh cool I can drag and drop!” and then you realize that you can only drag and drop from the hand and aside from making no sense, it just makes it that much more irritating that I have to move cards by clicking a menu button every time I want to do so. Is it still better than DB? Sure, but you’re already 90% of the way there, just get that extra 10% even though its the most difficult 10% to implement - its worth it.

Bugs:
Clicking “View” on my deck doesn’t work in manual mode against a bot. Something like this is mode breaking. Like… a small simple bug like this means I can’t play the entire mode. Its important. Why do you even have manual mode at all if you’re not going to put the same time into it as auto mode. You need another developer if the current one can’t handle it.

These are not like… difficult bugs to spot. You literally simply use the mode and you will run into these bugs, and its a consistent problem.

A testing suggestion would be to just play a manual game. Its a testing technique called “dog fooding”. Take one of your staff members, and play a game. Pick a deck that includes mechanics that will test all of your features, and just play a full match. Make sure you can actually execute those mechanics. Do this anytime a feature is realased that has functional implications across the game. I’m sure there are more bugs to report, but I’m blocked from testing by not being able to view my deck.

I’m a huge evangilist when it comes to using Omega as a replacement for DB. But it just makes everyone look bad when I talk about how great it is, I convince people to try it out and we can’t even get through a full game without running into trivially detectible and game breaking bugs. Its embarrssing for everyone.

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Thanks for being passionate about the project.
About the View button, its not supposed to open your card list, its supposed to ask your opponent whether the cards on that list can be revealed to you or not. Depending on their answer, your game will receive the information about those cards from the server. To open the actual list, you need to double tap on the zone slot.
As for dragging, ill try to improve it further, saddly those parts arent as easy to implement as the from hand ones, cause of the layers they being rendered into.
I’m aware that theres some game state issues that happens sometimes on manual, I did solve some, but there’s more things to solve yet, but they usually aren’t consistently reproduceable, which makes quite hard to spot them.

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As for dragging, ill try to improve it further, saddly those parts arent as easy to implement as the from hand ones, cause of the layers they being rendered into.

That’s good to hear :slight_smile: I know it can’t be easy but I really think it will be a massive improvement and that alone, so long as the rest of the features work, will result in it being a no-brainer in switching from DB for the usecase of just wanting to play test with friends. Obviously DB has judges so for ranked matches people will still use that. But just being able to drag and drop things is so simple, intuitive, seamless, and easy that people won’t want to do it any other way.

About the View button, its not supposed to open your card list, its supposed to ask your opponent whether the cards on that list can be revealed to you or not.

I completely understand this. The name of the button is intuitive, and that’s exactly what I would expect it to do when playing against a human.

However, you’re reasoning about this from a developer standpoint and not the player. Your game supports starting a manual mode match with a bot. But a manual mode match is currently unplayable because there’s no way to fetch cards out of the deck to test hands. Therefore, manual mode with a bot may as well not even exist. You’re basically allowing the player to start an unplayable game.

So however it needs to be implemented, that should be fixed. Maybe you have logic that just makes your bot auto accept requests like that. Or maybe if you’re playing a bot, it bypasses the need for a request altogether. Maybe it just means players can’t start manual mode games with bots. Not being able to start a bot game at all in manual mode is better from a design standpoint than allowing them to make one, and then they get to a screen where they have to press a button and when they do it does nothing and they can’t progress. (obviously I’d prefer that I could play test hands but I just wanted to make that point :slight_smile: )

Either way, a player doesn’t care why it doesn’t work. They just care that it doesn’t work.

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