Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Streamlinded Interface

I love improving stuff. Especially when i dont really like the way something is implemented in the first place.

Link to the game

Now take my Dreamland Chronicles game. It was converted from my Xblig game called Dreamland Chronicles Triva Challenge. The interface on the Xbox required you to pres certain buttons and to help you with that we used buttonhelp to show you the button associated with each action. A Simple process and one that is used most everywhere now.

Then we come to do the conversion to the Windows phone. We take the definition off the buttons and are left with a single grey blob. Then we make it so the player must hit these hot spots to choose answers to questions or input any decision like going to the menu etc. We published the game this way as we did not have a windows phone at the time to test the game on. I was also a novice when it came to experience using the touch screen interface.

Now however i am much much more familiar with input on touch devices. this caused me some consternation when i was playing or trying to answer the trivia questions to be exact. I have to hit the grey circle? WTF? Why?

So now i have removed them all, you can simply touch the answer text you think it is and the interface works as it should... Intuitively.

I know i will not make any news with this change. I am sure this will not bump my downloads which have been none existant since days after the launch. But i just could not take it that my reputation for clean games was on the line with this title being so bad with its interface.

Now i am happy though as the game has just got it's update published.

so if you are one the the 8 people that has bought the game, then please get the better new interfaced version. For free!

Thanks and keep it clean out there,
Da Voodoochief

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