Author: Sarah Northway

Fantastic Contraption
Originally uploaded by zemekiss.

A couple weeks ago we went up to Seattle for PAX. Stephen got a few photos of the event, which for me wasn’t so much about the games and the ravenous Fantastic Contraption fans (no really!), as getting to spend time with our friends from Vancouver. PAX was a bit crowded (60,000) this year and they had trouble fitting everyone into even the main panels in the huge hall. But we still managed to see everything we came for: Colin and Dan played Star Craft 2, I oogled Fallout 3. The highlight for me was the Jonathan Coulton concert. He brought Felicia Day out to sing “Still Alive” and the several thousand people in attendance sang along. I hadn’t realized I knew all the words…

We headed up to the island after that to spend the week with our families, and remarked over and over on how beautiful Vancouver Island is.

The next weekend was Beerfest – for many Victorians the event of the summer. The Northways got us tickets for Friday (the day for true beer fans) and together we went and sampled many an interesting brew. My favorite this year was Tin Whistle’s Peaches and Cream.. I guess the beautiful day put me in a girly mood because all my picks were the light fruity ones. :) I think Hugo’s Super G was better than ever; somebody else has got to pick up on putting ginger & ginseng in beer because I couldn’t bring myself to enter Hugo’s bar to order it now that their restaurant is closed. Oh – we never guessed Andy’s mystery beer!

I came back last weekend but Colin stayed in Nanaimo for another week. I got back just in time to catch the end of the Power to the Peaceful festival and concert which had the most amazing clothing vendors and some very odd food. Then the San Francisco Opera put on Opera in the Park which I went down and got the perfect seat dead center and just slightly up the hill. I sat and knitted – I’m learning to knit! – while I listened. Culture!

Then I spent a week playing Spore while Colin was away. It’s… well it’s not a gamer’s game, which is what I was hoping/imagining it would be. But they did an excellent job of taking four games that are traditionally hardcore and made them successfully casual. I would have enjoyed if the difficulty slider increased the complexity of the games, but obviously they had enough on their hands with this endeavor. I think they’ve done an amazing job, particularly on the UI which feels absolutely natural, and in integrating the tutorial into the gameplay. And I just can’t get enough of designing my little creatures!

Colin gets back today – huzzah!

Now that I’m an indy game developer I’ve been playing alot more indy games.

Alot of interesting games are very simple. And I kept having this intermittent idea of having an award for best game you can play with one button. The idea being that the one button game is the simplest interface possible.

Then lo-and-behold today I found it.

Strange Attractors 2: http://www.ominousdev.com/games.php

Has two buttons but you can turn one off. And it’s super fun. Making it the best game you can play with one button.

(plus it looks like Tron, so, default winner)

More in the series of articles about writing Fantastic Contraption.

With some measure of success comes some measure of administrative problems. The game is up and everyone loves it and all the press is good and the world is generally being my oyster. So that’s awesome.

But remember how I made this game in my free time? And how that is limited? Well development has dropped off to a slow trickle. Because all that free time I used to use to write code I now use to wrangle servers and write emails and put out fires.

Turns out having a massively popular flash game with login accounts, saved contraptions, a thriving board and a pay version generates alot of random little tasks.

Luckily Travis Stone is taking care of the hosting problems. So when the database went down today and when the hosting company is dragging its feet over upgrades he takes the brunt.

But when that happens there are also a bunch of PayPal payments that fail. Well, the payments don’t fail. I get the money. But the user is obviously never registered as paid. So I have to go correct all of those manually and write sorry notes to people if they’ve been waiting for a while.

Also it turns out there are just a ton of ways to buy things with PayPal. And I don’t support all of them as gracefully as I should. And my PayPal code is in PHP and I kind of hate PHP and don’t know it very well. So there is alot of trialing and erroring while I try to get all of that working.

And then there are the wonder-mails. The random emails of wonderous or possibly wonderous offers or events. Like job offers and offers to do things with the game and the like. Some of those are just awesome (thanks Pez for hosting the music for us!) but alot of them require negotiation and carefully worded replies. Which sucks up more time.

I think I spend more time replying to board posts about future development than I spend actually doing development.

But things are just going so peachy-well it’s impossible to complain. I’m not bitching, I’m merely cataloging. So the next guy knows what to expect.

tour de fat
Originally uploaded by mguthaus.

Rode down to New Belgium Brewing’s Tour de Fat bikes + beer festival in the park today where we drank beer, rode some wacky bikes and saw a couple unusual performances. I much enjoyed The Sprockettes who had an energetic bike themed dance act that culminated in human pyramids and a bicycle being played like a guitar (Colin was impressed). And a martial arts / juggling / dance / rock performance by Nanda which was delightfully strange and original. One of the four performers had a broken foot but they worked his crutches into the act amazingly well.

They had a free ride area with a dozen or so very strange bikes. Someone caught us in the act of totally pwning the ass-backwards handleless tandem you see here (we’re the ones on the right). The steering was like a tank, or those paddle boats where you turn by having one side pedal faster than the other. Colin wore his new bicycle suspenders which got a number of comments.

So we salute New Belgium for their taste in free outdoor events, if not entirely for their taste in malted alcoholic beverages (their beers are… mmm… okay).

More in the series of articles about writing the physics puzzle game Fantastic Contraption.

Today: usability. Or specifically: teaching people how to play your game.

Some of is going to make specific references to the game so you should go try out the game first. Be cool, it’s free, you can be your own little user-study.

Fantastic Contraption launched with a fairly simple tutorial system (as of the time of this writing is still has it). I basically just came up with it out of thin air. I guessed what people would need to know, what they would be confused by, and what they would figure out on their own. So I tried the make-it-up-as-you-go-along school of thought.

I took a usability class in university from one of my favorite profs Dr. Tzanetakis. And his mantra was ‘user testing’. The idea was that all the theory in the world falls down and you won’t know what is working and what isn’t without putting a user in front of your UI.

So I finally did some belated user testing (this is after the StumbleUpon traffic bomb). And I made some interesting discoveries.

For people who think like me the existing tutorial is great. Gamers tend to get it. It takes a little time to figure out the draw when stopped, hit go and you can’t touch it thing. And they try to drag and drop instead of draw. But mostly they clip through the tutorials and rock straight on through to Up The Stairs.

But I have left non-gamers in the dust. In the dust, choking on it, wondering why I hate them so much.

Just some of the things non-gamers are not taught well enough by the existing tutorial:

-draw not drag and drop (this is universal)
-have to draw inside the blue square
-you have to get the pink thing to the pink goal to win (despite pounding them over the head with it)
-you can’t draw when the simulation is running (the red reminder arrow goes completely unnoticed)
-your contraption can’t overlap terrain
-the basic principles of construction

I’m going to write a bit more on that last one: The basic principles of construction.

There is one tower of UI failure that towers mightily over all others. It may be the only thing that you need to truly understand in order to play Fantastic Contraption:

You must attach the rod to the centre of the wheel to make it spin. That little bit that is equidistant from all the other bits. The focus, the key, that of overriding importance. The Middle.

And I am a total fail on that front. I have one concession to teaching this truism in the current tutorial. There is an example contraption in the 2nd level that is a clockwise and a non clockwise wheel connected with a stick between their centers. But people don’t even get that this is an example contraption. And sometimes they do but then they start trying to replace the goal wheel with a non-spinning wheel.

Most often people put a rod between the two closest points of the wheels. Unfortunately this pretty much ends their gaming experience. They have now totally broken the contraption. They will have to find the delete tool if they are ever going to finish the level. So the thing non-gamers do most often also ensures that they will never play the game again. That is what UI experts call “bad”.

And oddly enough I never even considered it. It wasn’t before I did some good old fashioned user testing that I discovered I was turning away a huge percentage of my traffic angry and sullen, probably feeling stupid.

So now it’s time for quest redesign-the-tutorial. The tutorial is going to get very constraining and guided. It’s going to be alot of work, and it’s going to annoy the gamers (hopefully skip buttons will keep them happy). But something needs to change pretty drastically.

So there you go. More evidence that Dr. Tzanetakis’ mantra is completely correct.

Do User Testing. You don’t know what’s going on until you Do Some User Testing.

real quick: The user testing methodolgy I’m using is getting a co-worker, friend, neighbor, or friend of a friend to play the game. Then I reasure them that they aren’t an idiot and any failure is a failure on my part not theirs (this is important so they don’t get all nervous and freak out when things start going wrong). Then I just watch them, and don’t answer any questions. Let them fail and recover on their own. You won’t be there every time someone tries to play your game. I very occasionally prod them about what they are thinking. I’d do voiced-thought style studies but already have trouble getting people to participate.