I have been mulling things over the for the last week and have come to the conclusion that we must provide the player with more information. At present, the player gets backup information in a pane on the right edge of the window; it spans 300h x 740v. That’s enough to hold the player’s feelings towards the actor and the player’s assessment of the actor’s auragon counts.
An immediate problem that arises is the presentation of the player’s feelings towards the actor. How dare I impose feelings on the player! That has to go; the only thing that I need to display is the other actor’s feelings towards the player.
But now we come to the crux of the problem: to what extent should we require the player to remember the relationships and auragon counts? Shouldn’t this be part of the challenge to social intelligence?
Perhaps I should show only the HistoryBook in the pane on the right; this would require expanding the pane from 300h to 420h, which in turn would require a redesign of the screen. I’d have to shrink the faces, or shrink the icons. Currently they are 80px in diameter; if I shrank them to 72px, I would free up 64px, which might make the redesign less painful. I could shrink the icons down to 64px, that would free up 128px, easily enough to do the job — but is that going too far?