Don’t tell, show.

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I’ve noticed a path InZoi has taken towards getting a bunch of notifications with options. These seem to be on schedule and happen most days around the same time to all Zois controlled by the player.

What I mean by “don’t tell, show” is to take a step back from the popups with options and find a way to show what’s going on without interrupting the player.

Popups should be saved for important things, when popups appear every 5-10 minutes it gets annoying.

There are different kinds, from messages, calls, work, memory, school. There must be a better way to keep the UI clean and less contaminated with popups everywhere (also notifications).

For example, the calls:

  • Let the phone ring without the massive pick up / ignore pop up. Make it smaller, make the Zoi react to the call, maybe we can choose a ringtone? On the UI we already have a phone icon, use that instead to pick up adding a couple buttons on top of it, instead of the huge UI popup that appears at the top.
  • Have the option to silence calls and phone notifications / popups.
  • When there’s a conversation use the Zoi dialog on top of their head to tell what’s going on. If you need us to choose an option, maybe instead of a massive UI window, add a portrait of the caller next to the phone with 3-4 options we can pick from, when AI GPT interaction is live, it’d be great to have the call work the same way as texts where we can type into the conversation and have actual conversations with the Zois.

99% of the calls make no sense and just interrupt gameplay, the game needs less popups telling us what is happening and should allow us to see what IS happening. If a Zoi is calling because something happened make it happen, make the caller have a moodlet because of what happened, also avoid calls from Zois that are literally standing in-front of your controlled character (this has happened more than twice).

At school and jobs:

  • The same kind of pop up appears, if the pop up is not a serious matter that could really affect the Zoi let’s get rid of those filler popups, only interrupt gameplay with popups if the Zoi can be affected by a decision (like… really affected), and for all other interactions let them happen via text message or a call like described above.
  • Say, if a decision from a popup could mean a promotion on the job, sure throw the popup. But if it’s just filler, I’d rather skip it and not interrupt what I’m doing.

I just wish for more active gameplay and less “this and this happened haha, funny” I want to see it happening and affecting the Zois and world.

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I agree, they already have the small talk function where Zoi talks to another one automatically, maybe it could serve that purpose too, I’m not sure. The Zoi could answer the call and speech bubbles could appear showing what they might be talking about, if it’s sports, a ball, if it’s romance, a heart and your zoi in their animation reacting happily, if they’re arguing or if they’re not agreeing with what’s being said in the conversation, a bubble with an X, the zoi reacting angry during the call.

This call with pop-up bothers me because besides the pop-up appearing, the conversations are completely vague and have no impact at all on the character. A Zoi called mine to vent, but about what the venting was about, I have no idea, because the game doesn’t show more information about what happened, then it just appears thanking me for listening and then you wonder, what could have happened for the Zoi to need to vent, maybe because they were fired or ended a relationship or just had a bad day? I’ll never know.

Therefore, if a pop-up is going to appear and still be something vague that I have to imagine, it would be better if no pop-up appeared at all and something like what I mentioned at the beginning happened, the cell phone could ring and we see our Zoi clicking on their cell phone to answer and from then on the face of the Zoi we’re talking to would appear in the taskbar with a cell phone icon next to it and the speech bubbles I mentioned before would appear and then we would imagine what could be being talked about guided by the bubbles that appear.

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Yes, I agree. Every time a parent interacts with an infant or toddler, a pop-up appears. I’d say that’s too much.