RE: Xconq UI thoughts

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com>]

Stan Shebs wrote:
>
> 1. Xconq should follow the prevailing trends in game
> interface design, and it
> should be informed by the A-list games rather than the
> obscure ones.

"Should," but, there are the dictates of budget and doability.  Where's
your team of artists?  Your army of programmers to provide custom GUI
work?  Your project management infrastructure on par with something
like, say, the Nebula 3D engine?
http://nebuladevice.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Nebula/WebHome

AAA titles are into multi-million dollar budgets now.  You have to
implement a UI you can afford with volunteers.  If anybody knows of UI
that has been achieved by volunteers that have AAA production values,
great, show it to me.  We'll learn from whatever they did.  But I have
not seen it.  People generally reserve that level of polish for things
they intend to make a living from.

And not to state this unfairly, but there's a developer breeding
mechanism at work in such things.  People who really value AAA
production values, and who are capable of producing them, move on and
find a way to make those things in commercial products.  People who
don't, generally stay behind in hobbyist freeware projects like Xconq.
I'd love any pointers to specific exceptions that break the general
rule.  But from where I sit, the people with the drive and talent to
produce what you're suggesting, generally aren't available as volunteer
labor.

> 2. Office apps are not fun. Multiple overlapping windows,
> floating palettes,
> etc, all get a big "yechh" from players, and very few use
> them.

I agree totally.

> (Developers think they're cool,

Not all of 'em.  This one certainly doesn't.

> but do you want your audience to be game
> players or game developers?)

Actually, my personal agenda is what Xconq (or any suitable 4X TBS
platform) can do for *Game Designers* as an experimental medium.  I am
not primarily concerned with trying to reach as many players as
possible.  I want to reach many more players than Xconq currently does,
but I certainly wouldn't set myself up for AAA production values in
order to reach some mega-goal.  I will have long since returned to my
own proprietary efforts before that happens.  For me personally this is
about prototyping some game design ideas.

> 3. Players are willing to tolerate less efficient interfaces
> if they are
> entertaining to use. The standard video game preference
> panels are nasty
> modal things, but developers dress them up with animation and
> sound effects, and players are OK with that.

No, they are not all ok with that.  But again, I am circulating in game
designer circles such as http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gamedesign-l/ and
news://comp.games.development.design  My main agenda is that all the
mouseclicks and sloth has to die.

> 4. Players are not programmers; complicated automation features will
> likely not be used.

Thus, it is paramount to design simple ones.

> Players are perfectly happy to do repetitive actions
> if they're being entertained while doing them.

And the main problem with the 4X TBS genre, present incarnation of Xconq
included, is that *many* players are *not* entertained by all the
mindless gobbledygook they must slog through to finish a game.  As far
as I'm concerned, this is strong evidence that players are *not*
entertained by repetitive actions after a certain threshold.

> 5. Players hate to type; they would rather roll around a
> bunch of buttons
> and popups than hit a single key on the keyboard.

I agree.

> (Programmers love keyboards, but see #4.)

No, not all of them do.  I hate 'em.

> 6. All this applies to game design too. Only a handful of the
> most hardcore
> want to write GDL, scripts, or whatever; that's as true of
> Quake as it is
> of Xconq, Quake just has a much larger fan base from which to
> recruit the hardcores.

Yes, one has to be mindful of building lotsa technological
infrastructure on the premise that someone wants to use it.
Infrastructure should be built for people who are *actually* using it,
as they actually *need* it.  If you run around trying to provide general
purpose capabilities, you will never produce any content and you will
eventually get bored.


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.