Posts Tagged ‘text user interface’

Sprint @ BALTAN Laboratories, day I

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

logo BALTAN laboratories

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, 2010

When 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.


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