Archive for the ‘interface design’ Category
Library projection progress
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012Resuming work on the installation
Friday, January 20th, 2012And another secret preview. We’ll explain what’s in the books soon.
Starting work on a “live world” projection
Sunday, December 11th, 2011Following on from the VIDA win, we need to work hard on Naked on Pluto’s gallery installation presence. Although we now have the news website style front page, we need to take the game externalisation to another level, and one of the things required is a realtime projection of the game world. This represents the unfiltered behind-the-scenes view of the game as seen by the bots as they attempt to keep track of what is going on. Technically we decided to do this work using HTML5 canvas, in keeping with the web based themes of the game it needs to work on a browser, which has the added bonus of making gallery setup quite simple.
My first approach was to write a scheme bricks representation for Javascript objects, and see how bits of the game looked if rendered in this way.
Art installation plans
Thursday, November 17th, 2011Some secret plans for a possible future Naked on Pluto art installation:
Call for testers
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
“Good news everyone!”
We have reached the point where we can start having some players test and try break things with the current pre-alpha-thingy-candidate version of the game. We are looking for just a couple of testers who can cope with the fact that they will get early spoilers and experience a not entirely finished game narrative and interface. On the other hand you will greatly help us stabilize things, spot a few more bugs and make final improvements!
Take into account that you will have to use an issue tracker to report us problems (ie, using a website with a form to check for existing known problems and report new ones) and that we will ask you some questions after you played.
Use the contact form in this blog to get in touch with us :)
Meet the users: Playtest Session at Baltan
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
Today was a crucial and quite scary step for the project: playtesting.
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Sprint @ BALTAN Laboratories, day I
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
Monday October 11, the first day at BALTAN Laboratories in Eindhoven! We walked to the SWA building, through Phillips Complex S, and at the 8th floor gasped at the enormous space of the lab. After a grand tour by director Angela Plohman, we set up and started to write down the master plan for this week. Lots of decisions to make, especially after the playtests we’ve held. The feedback we received made sure we zoomed in on the parts that needed the most attention first.
First task was to make the interface more user friendly. Most playtesters were too busy trying to figure out what to type and how to type it, instead of discovering the game world. We decided to simplify the vocabulary, write more elaborate help texts in case of an error, and write a general “help” that gives an overview of the vocabulary, what each word does, tips to speed up navigation through the world and all this with clear examples.
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Interface Design and Text-Based Games
Thursday, September 9th, 2010When Marloes, Dave and myself started to discuss about this Facebook game idea, we quickly agreed that we were more interested in using a text-only environment. It’s faster to develop, the constraint is a great catalyst for creativity, it forces you to approach gaming outside of the popular interface metaphors and, above all, it fits perfectly with the text fueled social media environments we want to describe.
