Hot answers tagged user-experience
20
I find myself most satisfied when I see what appear at first glance to be prime numbers.
If the score always just adds a 0 (10, 20, 50, 200, 300 etc.) at the end, I feel cheated.
Multiples of 5 (5, 25, 45, 80, 95 etc.) are a bit better, but you quickly catch on to the fact that your accomplishment is worth 1/5 of what's being shown.
Numbers like 47, 76, ...
15
From left field:
Don't allow the player to give direct orders to his units
The idea is that you give the player's troops the same AI capabilities as the enemy, and then provide him with a goal setting system and a state toggle system.
The player can set goals/objectives attached to enemy units or map locations, such as:
Destroy this
Guard area
Clear ...
12
You propose running each separate "system" in parallel. The problem with this is that you will have to lock every single piece of shared state. CLARITY EDIT: When you have two parallel operations using all of the same data, lock contention and synchronization is going to slow things down so that you're not gaining many benefits from the parallelization.
...
10
I would say the main reason why some games use such high numbers is, because they don't want to deal with fractions. "0.375 Experience Points" just isn't as catchy as "375 Experience Point". Those numbers have a wider range and variation for balancing without the need of fractions.
The developer can still decide later in a patch to use 1015 points as damage ...
7
Don't allow it. Give the player a specific role, and that's it. The guy who gives the orders to attack a group of enemies to the north isn't sitting there at the fight telling each guy who to shoot, he's back at base giving more orders to other soldiers.
For a more realistic/immersive experience, and to discourage/prevent micromanagement, allow the player ...
7
The standards should be, "whatever the code department needs, within reason". This may involve the coders writing exporter plugins for artists. But there is no standard way of distributing art since there is no standard way of consuming or using art. It's just down to what the technology pipeline requires.
However, as some rough guidelines:
First, ask ...
7
The iTunes App Store already has a process in place for adding custom terms and conditions to any app you upload.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/iTunesConnect_Guide/8_AddingNewApps/AddingNewApps.html
Scroll down to "Providing an End User License Agreement".
Tell your lawyer about this if he doesn't ...
6
Preamble: As Patrick Hughes noted, for the "correct" answer to your question, take a sample of test playes. Give one group your game with standard scores, and a second group the same game but with 100x/1000x the scores.
Fractions: Depends on your Game, really. Commenter Joe provided an example of where rounding can occur, but that's about Hit Points rather ...
5
Holiday events can be made as an incentive to get "fun" stuff, but as mentioned don't make them game-breaking qualities. Then players can get bragging rights over others who missed out on the promotion. It also lets people know that the creators are still putting in their effort to keep supporting the game.
Also, Animal Crossing is a good offline example. ...
5
Looking at Team Fortress 2, yes, players do. Holiday events are good, they bring old and new players to your game. But make them really funny - not just a little item set or a 10% deal. And if you add holiday items, don't make them overpowered and game-obstructing. It's your choice make holiday events or not, but I recommend you to make them to increase ...
5
It sounds like a Hidden Markov Model might be useful to you. These define certain states with statistical probabilities of transitions from one state to each of the other states based on relative frequency in observations.
You can define some weather states for instance 'rainy' and 'sunny' and probabilities of transitions from rainy to sunny and sunny to ...
5
What about splitting the the weather into more detailed parts?
Precipitation - none/light/moderate/heavy
Wind - none/light/moderate/heavy
Type - rain/hail/snow
You can still store this in a single SQL column if you want by making it a simple enum with 48 (4*4*3) possible values (removing any strange conflicts you don't like).
5
You probably want to start with reasonably realistic (if simplified) physics and make modifications from there. The first modification you'll likely make will be using something called damping. This is essentially adding extra friction to selected interactions and velocity components. The second modification is detecting states that aren't recoverable (i.e. ...
5
There is no standard. About as close as you get to one is using the left stick to move and the right stick to look around or aim and using B for Cancel/No options (but no general standard for the Accept/Yes option!). Other than that it's all over the place.
A number of popular modern games have used all of the following for a primary fire button:
A
X
...
4
There is no mention of such in the app store review guidelines; however you are strongly encouraged to comply with the iOS HIG which, among other things, suggests never quitting programmatically and always being ready to stop in response to the Home button (iOS Developer account required to view those links, I think).
Because of the above, I would not be ...
4
I'd say higher numbers tend to make players happy. It's better to get $1000 instead of $10, right? Big numbers also go better together with effects. Imagine a particle explosion and sound-effects every time you achieve something in the game. That would certainly look better with an accompanying 14'500, than some low number like 34. Big numbers give the ...
4
In short..
I'd be thinking this through science.
As we all know, snow is rain and vice versa, except they have different solid states due to temperature changes.
Temperature changes can be associated to winds.
A quick Google for "what causes wind" gave me an answer from Answers.com:
"The pressure gradient force, which arises from the uneven heating ...
4
Generally, you should not “cull” physics updates in your game with respect to the screen, except perhaps to a very limited extent — things not moving when they are off-screen is now seen as archaic. What you need to do instead is make the updates more efficient.
You state that you have tile-based liquids. I assume they are flowing around by checking their ...
4
Why not just have users vote on the level or other selectable options instead of the master?
Many times it might be hard to get over 50% of the players to vote on anything; so there may never be a master in most games.
What you should have is the ability to vote on a level and the level or options with the most votes will be played regardless of what ...
3
If you want players to just focus on managing resources, economy, etc. you can do what Startopia did. Which is, the player recruits or produces units and then builds structures for them which they'll inhabit automatically. As for combat, player can set up points of interest for the troops to gather at or attack (if it's an enemy unit or building) and assign ...
3
I have no such data, but you haven't mentioned another downside: For me at least, having to download assets separately is very annoying.
Also, while the marketplace can download large apps in the background, in my experience it is not always clear whether (or even the case that) I can do other things with my phone while the game is fetching assets, as this ...
3
You can find a good list of commands in many places in the IF community. You could try downloading Inform 7, TADS 3, ADRIFT, QUEST, and so on and looking at their default commands. There's a less comprehensive list in this guide, http://inform7.com/if/anth/IntroductionToIF.pdf .
Your second question is much less clear-cut. Some IF games successfully ...
2
Indeed higher scores are said to make the player feel like he's playing better, and hence could enhance user experience. This needs to be experimented for you to really find if this makes a difference in your specific game. If you compare an arcade game like Every Extend Extra Extreme and a platformer like Mario, the effect score has on the player is widely ...
2
The artists were able to keep the raw assets in any format they wanted. They would then export the files to a specific format, either from a plugin to Max/Maya that we made that would dump the data out in our format or simply saving as a PNG for photoshop and the like with the quality settings varying from project to project (ie, from target platform to ...
2
All arcade game music is repetitive if you pay attention to it. The music you choose should not be something that is very noticeable. You want your users to be playing your game not listening to the music. The music should just be there to fill in the void of no sounds.
As an example, take a look at the tetris sound tracks.
As a side note, if you are ...
2
I agree with thedaian but would like to expand upon his point. Most micromanagment is done to make up for the AI being inefficient. When I micro its usually because either: my troops won't kill weak units before targeting stronger ones, they won't target high dps units before lower dps units, they won't concentrate fire to take out individual units (kind of ...
2
Consider dividing the player's focus such that micromanagement is only available at a level of extreme focus. In Starcraft or like games, the interface is the same whether you're building buildings or directing units. However, if there were a context shift between resource management, camp development, large-scale strategic unit deployment, and small-scale ...
2
Our life is frittered away by detail . . . simplify, simplify. (Henry David Thoreau)
My answer is similar to those that suggest picking a clear role for the player. What they're really saying is to simplify I think.
The reason micromanagement happens is because there are very many choices to make during play, and in general they only really matter in ...
2
You could use an indented tech tree, assuming you don't have too many layers. It is probably easier to show what I mean than it is to explain it. An excerpt from an example AoE2 tech tree below:
Barracks (I)
Militia (I)
Man-at-Arms (II)
Long Swordsman (III)
Two-Handed Swordsman (IV)
Champion (IV)
Spearman (II)
Pikeman (III)
Halberdier (IV)
...
1
Instead of click-speed limiting how many orders a player can send, make it an in-game resource. Click too fast and you run our of orders and have to wait to accumulate new ones. Order single units and you can only afford to move a few per minute, but make big group moves and you can keep your entire army moving. There would still be a benefit to ...
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