That said, this isn’t a new concept. The International Correspondence Chess Federation reports that correspondence chess may have been played way back in the 12th century. Chess is a perfect example of when asynchronous multiplayer games make sense – in chess, each move is hugely important, and there is a ton of thought that goes into each one. In mobile games though, asynchronous multiplayer doesn’t always fit the game.

When asynchronous multiplayer is a good fit for a mobile game

Here are three rules for determining when it makes sense to support asynchronous multiplayer in a game:

1. When players can easily figure out what the current state of the game is, and they don’t need a huge refresher each time they take a turn
2. When both a game and a turn can be completed in a reasonable amount of time
3. Players always have something meaningful to do each turn

This works really well with lots of word games. It’s easy to pick up games like Words with Friends and Letterpress when it’s your turn, and there’s always a meaty decision to make. There are no “throwaway” turns when you’re trying to get a triple word score!

Another really good implementation of asynchronous multiplayer is in Super Stickman Golf 2. The turn-based mode has players competing for the best score in a 9-hole round of mini golf. The best part is it’s not one hole at a time, each player completes two holes at a time. While it doesn’t sound like a big deal, that makes all the difference in the world when actually playing a game. While one hole could be completed in just one shot, two holes is a much more satisfying chunk of time to spend in the game. And even better, rounds are finished twice as fast.

Real Racing 3 takes an interesting spin on the topic, with what they are calling “time-shifted multiplayer“. The idea being you can race against your friends, except you’re actually racing against the AI that’s acting like your friends. I haven’t gotten the chance to play it myself quite yet, but it sounds like a cool way to introduce a bit of multiplayer in a racing game without all the coordination of getting your friends together.

One last game – Draw Something does a great job of keeping players hooked by the way the turns are setup. The game transitions right from “guess what your friend drew” into “what do you want to draw?” Since players don’t have the chance to get distracted between those steps, it keeps the chain alive and puts the ball back in the other person’s court. Since a game is always mid-turn and not at what feels like a “safe stopping point”, it makes it that much harder to stop playing. Classic!

When asynchronous multiplayer doesn’t work quite as well

Certain game types don’t lend themselves well to turn-based multiplayer, especially ones that are some kind of reflex or dexterity based. Games like Angry Birds and Jetpack Joyride, it just doesn’t make sense in those situations. You could do like the old Pac-Man arcade machine and just compare scores at the end of each round, but I don’t think it would be very compelling.

I’m a big fan of board games on mobile devices, but unfortunately some games just need to be played in real-time. Lost Cities works okay, though in many turns it feels like nothing of interest really happens. Carcassonne is better in that each turn, the player makes a more meaningful decision by placing a tile.

Ticket to Ride Pocket (the iPhone version, NOT the iPad version) recently added an asynchronous multiplayer mode in a patch. This might be the most painful experience I’ve had in a turn-based game, and it breaks all three of the rules listed above. Let’s review:

1. Especially on the iPhone version, it’s really hard to tell what the state of the board is, and what goals you’re trying to achieve. It’s just so small, and there’s so much packed in, it takes some re-orientation every turn to remember where you need to go, and what your strategy was.
2. A game of Ticket to Ride isn’t especially fast in person, so while each turn is short, an entire game could take months to finish.
3. For the majority of turns, players will be just drawing cards from the deck. Not much for a meaningful decision.

For sure, Ticket to Ride Pocket isn’t a fun experience when playing a prolonged asynchronous game. Not to say that the game overall isn’t fun – it’s one of the best board game translations I’ve seen on iOS. And the asynchronous multiplayer mode does work great if you’ve got players dedicated to finishing a game in an hour or two. When playing quickly, you can treat the mode basically like an auto-save, which is quite handy.

Conclusion

Asynchronous multiplayer is a really compelling feature that makes a lot of sense for many mobile games. If I can rock out a turn of some game on my lunch break or waiting in line at the DMV, that’s awesome. It doesn’t work in all situations, but for many games that are simple enough to be playable on a phone or tablet, it is a welcome addition.

What asynchronous multiplayer games out there did you find particularly compelling? Or any that were especially a bad fit? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Quento: Shaking My iPhone Makes Me Sad
2. Quento: When a Title Screen Meets a Tutorial
3. Super Stickman Golf: Accidentally Quitting Mid-Round

Forza Horizon is one of the seven currently-released games for Xbox 360 that actually supports SmartGlass – and the only one that I own – so I was excited to give it a try the other day. Its big feature in the game is to offload the map to your tablet, making it a little easier to navigate the game’s big open world. In my limited testing so far, this definitely falls into the camp of a promising technology that just doesn’t nail the execution.

Getting connected

I could have almost predicted that it wouldn’t just immediately pop open and work. I’ve got an iPad (3rd gen), and getting it connected to my Xbox 360 just feels like something that would be sketchy. And it was. I had a lot of trouble getting Forza Horizon to recognize that I had a SmartGlass device attached – it just sat on the “Start driving to activate GPS” screen for quite a while.

Here’s my first beef with the Xbox SmartGlass app: it’s not good that it doesn’t immediately connect when I have Forza Horizon open, it’s even worse that the app doesn’t give you good feedback on what the problem might be. This is the screen that appears when you fire up the Forza Horizon Xbox SmartGlass Experience:

The thing is, you get this same screen regardless of what the state of your system is –  even if your Xbox is off. I spent quite a while playing Forza Horizon with this screen open not realizing that my iPad just wasn’t “connected” to my Xbox. I started up the iPad app before turning on my Xbox, so it never actually connected. The iPad SmartGlass app knows this – I would have appreciated a message telling me so. “Start driving” doesn’t help.

And the last time I tried to test this out, it just refused to connect. No amount of restarting devices and re-connecting connections made any difference. I have no idea what happened there. Does this work better on Android tablets or on Windows 8 devices? I’m sure hoping it does.

When it works

Okay, so assuming you get your tablet connected to your Xbox, what does SmartGlass do for you? It turns your tablet into a map of the Forza Horizon world. This is actually really cool. I complain a lot here on the site about accessing game maps, and I absolutely love the idea of being able to separate out the map from the game screen. It does force you to take your eyes off the road so to speak, but more often than not it’s the sort of thing where you’d pick a new destination only when you’re already stopped. Like immediately after you finish a race, that’s when you want to pick a new destination.

What’s more, a touchscreen tablet is a way better interface for maps than is an Xbox controller. One of the most impressive apps to come with the original iPad was definitely Google Maps. Using touch controls on a map is really satisfying, especially when compared with a thumbstick.

Sadly, tapping “Set Route” doesn’t seem to do anything for me.

But once again, this experience still wasn’t flawless. The map is supposed to show you all the races that are available, and let you set a destination right from your SmartGlass device. In my testing, despite the filters being set correctly, none of the landmarks ever showed up. And while it looked like I could set a destination, it never made it over to my Xbox. So that’s pretty much the entire point of the entire integration, and it just didn’t work for me, which is unfortunate.

For the record, this random YouTube video does show the functionality actually working for an iPad user, so it must be something with my setup. I have no idea how to troubleshoot a problem like this though.

Conclusion

From a UX perspective, I fully believe that Xbox SmartGlass-like applications could be a huge benefit to gamers, if used appropriately. What if in LA Noire, your casebook was actually on your tablet instead of something you constantly had to swap to on the screen? That would be awesome. But in a Call of Duty-style FPS, I’m not sure if there’s anything that gamers would actually take their eyes off the screen long enough to read, and it probably would cause a competitive balance problem anyway. Halo 4 uses SmartGlass to display stats about your character, which seems reasonable.

Much like the promise of the Wii U’s tablet controller, when used appropriately, there’s a lot to be gained here. Merits of the Wii U’s controller (and the Wii U itself) aside, it at least functions consistently, which is more than I can say for the Xbox SmartGlass app on my iPad. I hope Microsoft gets this worked out and developers actually take advantage of what could be a really cool add-on.

So what do you think? Is there any second-screen functionality that you could put in an FPS that would actually work? Maybe a leaderboard I suppose? Lets discuss in the comments!

Related posts:

1. XBox SmartGlass on the iPad: UX First Impressions
2. Forza Horizon: One Amazing Tutorial
3. Getting Lost in The Witcher 2: How Not to Build a Map

Merits of the upgrade aside, there’s one particular issue with the game that hasn’t changed between the two versions, and it has caused me a tiny amount of grief a few times now. When playing a single player round, backing out to the main menu doesn’t save the player’s progress, and the game doesn’t do anything to warn them of this either. Just like Microsoft Word prompts users before leaving changes unsaved, games always should tell the player before they lose progress.

For the sake of completeness, let me walk you through the process. Let’s say you’re halfway through a round of Super Stickman Golf 2 and you want to head back to the menu. Why would you want to do this? One of the features added in SSG2 is turn-based multiplayer, so maybe you just got a notification that a game was updated and you want to check it out. You tap the pause button and get a standard issue looking menu with the following options:

From here, pressing the Main Menu button will take you directly back to the main menu, no questions asked, and all your progress in the round you were on has been lost. At least it’s consistent, because Restart Course does the same thing.

Okay, so the game doesn’t offer a confirmation before going back to the main menu, how big of a deal is it? Unlike a game of Madden that takes 45 minutes to play, getting through 9 holes in Super Stickman Golf takes 5 minutes or so. This is probably why you have to confirm quitting a game of Madden twice, even after the game is over (note: my copy of Madden 12 for the Xbox fails to work, so I can’t 100% confirm this, but this is what I remember).

Despite this, anytime I lose progress in a game, it makes me unhappy. Even if it was just three holes that I could redo in two minutes.

What should have happened?

This situation is easily avoidable. Ideally, a user would be able to go back to the main menu and pick up where they left off. This does definitely make things more complicated though, because the concept of “saving” gets messy in a hurry. Do you start to have multiple save slots? Can you start playing multiple different courses? What about syncing saves between devices?

An easier solution though is a simple confirmation dialog. “Hey if you go back to the main menu, your progress will be lost”. This doesn’t cover all situations, but I’d guess it’s what most players would expect, and it adds one more layer of security.

iCloud sync: progress saved!

Despite my issue above with losing progress in the middle of a round, Super Stickman Golf 2 does offer a great feature that helps users keep their progress across iOS devices: iCloud sync. This is becoming more common in games these days and I am really excited about it. As an owner of both an iPad and an iPhone, I appreciate games that let me take my game from my iPhone to my iPad and back again. For whatever reason, iCloud saves don’t always work well (see the Civilization Revolution article), but it’s a great thing when they do.

Conclusion

Take great pains to make sure your game doesn’t let players lose their progress. Sometimes it’s unavoidable – if the phone reboots mid-game, what can you really do? But for situations that are expected, always make sure users know the results of their actions. If you want players to get back to the main menu without a confirmation prompt, then build in a function to resume where they left off.

What other games can you think of that make it easy to lose progress? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

Related posts:

1. A Case Study in How Not To Handle Errors
2. 10000000: A Brief Usability Review
3. Burnout Crash!: Show Me The Achievements

So, tutorials in mobile games must be as flexible as mobile phones are. While games like Quento are simple enough to barely need a tutorial, not all games can get away with that. Lost Cities for iOS (iTunes link) offers the most flexible tutorial I’ve ever seen in a mobile game – there are no less than four different ways for players to get the rules of this game when they fire it up for the first time.

Lost Cities is a mobile implementation of the card game originally designed by Reiner Knizia (BGG link). I’m a fan of the physical version, so I was excited to hear that TheCodingMonkeys had built an excellent recreation. It isn’t super complicated, it’s a little abstract, and it’s a great candidate for a quick game to play on your phone.

When I started playing my first game, I knew I needed a refresher on the rules, and here’s the screen that greeted me:

I was really excited by this – the game gives you the option to hear the game explained to you either in audio or in caption form via an interactive tutorial. Or, you can just read the manual yourself, OR have the manual read to you! All of these have valid use cases depending on the context in which the game is being played. When I was first presented with this screen, I was half watching some TV and I’d already played the game before, so I just read the manual.

Which is a good point – if your game is something that your users might already know how to play, don’t force them to walk through a whole tutorial on it.

I’m a big fan of board and card games, and let me tell you, there is no substitute for having someone sit down and explain the game to you. The best rulebook in the world is never going to match a real person. So it’s very helpful to have the “I want to listen” option here, where a voice explains how Lost Cities works to you in the same way a real person would. And of course, if you’re playing the game in the bathroom, “I want to read” is just as good without being super awkward.

Conclusion

When your mobile game is more complicated than Quento or Angry Birds, some explanation of the rules needs to happen. A well-designed and compact explanation of your game (I’m looking at you, 20 minute Ghost Trick intro tutorial) is the first thing many players are going to experience, so make it work for whatever environment they are in. Don’t give players a reason to procrastinate playing your game until it’s more convenient.

In the same way that responsive web design brings the right amount of design to users of all kinds of screen sizes, this is like a responsive game tutorial. No matter what level of interaction you’re looking for, there is an option that will fit your needs. Responsive Game Tutorials, you heard it here first.

This is the first time I’ve seen such a clear option given to the player in how they want to get the tutorial, and the first time I’ve seen an option to read the manual out loud. Are there other mobile adaptations of physical games out there that have creative ways to get the rules across? Let me know in the comments…

Related posts:

1. Mobile Games: Tutorials Should Fit Mobile Attention Spans
2. Quento: When a Title Screen Meets a Tutorial
3. Getting Lost in The Witcher 2: How Not to Build a Map

Setting up your Paradigms effectively is an important part of the game. If you’re in the middle of a big battle and discover you don’t have the right combination of roles, it might be a long and painful fight. Despite there being only six slots for Paradigms, it’s still a minor pain to get everything setup correctly. And – here’s my primary issue with the system – every time characters are switched in and out of your party, all your Paradigms are reset, and they all have to be configured again.

How Paradigms work

If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, a Paradigm is a set of roles that your party takes on during a battle. Each character in Final Fantasy XIII starts with three different roles they can use – there are six in total, and are the typical roles you’d imagine in an RPG. So an example Paradigm is called “Relentless Assault” and consists of one heavy damage dealer (the Commando role) and two magic users (the Ravager role).

The game calls a set of Paradigms a “Paradigm Deck”, and here’s what it looks like:

You can (and need to) switch Paradigms mid-battle, and having all this stuff setup beforehand and being able to efficiently change Paradigms is a big part of the game’s strategy. If you’re getting hammered, it’s time to switch to a Paradigm that contains a medic (or two).

It sounds simple, but there are a lot of combinations to choose from, and the game only allows 6 combinations to be setup at any one time. Each character only starts with three available roles, so figuring out what party members are needed adds another layer of complexity. Sure, it’s not the most complicated mechanism in the world, but there’s definitely decisions to be made, and I often find myself wishing I had more options in the middle of a battle.

Know your role (and your Paradigm)

Okay, let’s talk about the problem. You’ve got six characters, and each of them has a different set of roles they can use. So when you swap one character out for another one, all of your preset Paradigms are removed. This makes sense, because at least some of your Paradigms won’t be possible anymore. You could make an argument that the game should preserve any that could be still valid, but whatever.

However, since each character in the game has their own strong point, if you have a set of three characters in the game, you’re probably always going to use a similar set of Paradigms with those three. So, what the game should do is recall the Paradigm Deck that was setup the last time those three characters were together.

For example, in my game at the moment I’m rolling with Fang, Lightning, and Vanille. I’m using Fang in the Commando or Sentinel roles, Lightning as Commando or Ravager, and Vanille as Ravager or Medic. Occasionally, I might want to swap out Fang for Snow. But every time I have Fang, Lightning, and Vanille in the same party, I basically want to have the same Paradigms setup. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t remember what my Paradigms were and I have to go about setting them up again each time.

Here’s a short video showing Final Fantasy XIII crushing my Paradigm Deck when swapping between characters (and back):

For me, it’s easy for RPGs to border on being tedious with all the fiddling that has to go on in the various menus. It’s a double-edged sword I suppose, because managing my characters is part of what I love about the genre. Having to go back and re-setup Paradigms all the time though, is not fun at all, and it feels a little bit like backtracking. As a result, I avoid changing characters as much as possible – and that’s too bad, considering I still spend a lot of time upgrading each one’s stats and weapons.

Conclusion

Honestly, for a game that I’ve spent 45 hours on so far, having to re-setup my Paradigm Deck when switching characters probably shouldn’t be that big of a deal. However, the fact remains that when I’m using the same three characters, I’m probably going to have a similar set of Paradigms set up, so there’s no reason the game couldn’t remember that and save me a little bit of work.

Did you notice the same thing about Paradigms in Final Fantasy XIII? Or maybe you think it’s better to force the player into making new decisions each time? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Final Fantasy XIII: A Great Loading Screen
2. Final Fantasy XIII: Where is North?
3. Skyrim: Four Quick Thoughts on the UI’s Usability

The internet has a lot of complaints about SimCity, at various levels of validity. The UI hasn’t been one of them, and that’s because it’s pretty good. A favorite feature of mine is all the various data maps you can turn on. This puts an extra layer of data right on top of your city, no extra screen required. However, despite the small city size (a common complaint for sure), you still can’t actually see your whole city if you zoom out all the way, making all those sexy data maps a little less useful.

First let’s take a look at the data maps overlay. It’s a great way to get a visual representation of all kinds of things that are going on in your city. If there’s any complaint to be made here, it’s that it might take a second to figure out what some of these icons are. Like that little gear on the end of the second row? It means “industrial tech” but I only know that because I just looked it up. My only other complaint might be how this overlay lives in the extreme lower right corner of the screen, which means I usually accidentally scroll around the map trying to get at it. Thankfully that’s something I can adjust in the settings menu.

Anyway, the data maps are awesome because it gives me a lot of data without taking me into a menu or somewhere away from my city. So if I want to look at where the water table is before I plop my sewage output pipe, I can do that. Here’s a sample happiness map:

Super helpful stuff here with a minimum of UI. But here’s the problem. That screenshot above is fully zoomed out, and at that camera angle, I’m only seeing about 1/4 of my city. So to see the whole thing, I’ve got to get a super-low camera angle, something like this:

And even then I can’t see everything; there’s more buildings off to the left and the right that you’ve got to scroll around to see.

It’s a minor annoyance, but it’s a feature that should be able to give the user a quick view of some aspect of their city at a glance, and scrolling around is just a pain. It’s especially funny to me considering how big of a deal the internet is collectively making about the tiny city size. I would think the small cities would make it more feasible for your computer to render the whole city at once, but for whatever reason, it isn’t happening here.

There is a lot to talk about with the new SimCity…what do you think? What features do you think are outstanding? Or are you still trying to get on a server and stay there? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Borderlands 2: Thoughts on Usability
2. Borderlands 2: Mission Information When You Need It
3. Diablo 3: More Auction House Usability Issues

And it is a good time. However…there’s one problem, while not unique to this game, that I’ve found particularly irritating here. The big benefit to touchscreens, of course, is removing that disconnect between you and your content that’s caused by a mouse and keyboard. Unfortunately, not only is your finger significantly bigger than a mouse pointer, it’s also attached to your hand. So when tapping items on the screen, your finger has a nasty habit of covering exactly what you want to look at.

Let’s look at exactly what I’m talking about. Below is a screenshot of the game – the squares at the top represent various abilities that you get throughout the game. If you hold your finger on one of them, it will tell you a brief description of what it does, which is pretty helpful. Each of these abilities has a “cooldown” too, so that’s another important piece of information that’s in this tap-and-hold popup.

That’s the screenshot. Here’s what it looks like in the real world:

Yeah, it’s a little difficult to read with a thumb in the way. Of course, the natural way to solve this is to awkwardly tilt your phone so you can see under your thumb:

Thankfully, it’s not the only way. If you slide your finger to the right or left, the tip will stay up so you can look at it. As long as you lift up your thumb from somewhere other than the button, it shouldn’t fire that ability. But that’s not exactly the most intuitive (or convenient) solution, and I’m a little curious if that was even done on purpose or not.

I appreciate the game including this important help text. Especially for a casual mobile game, it’s really important for players to be able to remind themselves what the skills do. The icons are good, but not super descriptive, and the cooldown information isn’t displayed anywhere else. So definitely, that information has to exist somehow, and I think having it in a tap-and-hold popup like this is a perfectly reasonable choice.

What are solutions to this problem? Other than having invisible thumbs (which would be pretty great, except maybe if you’re chopping vegetables)? The most obvious one for me is to move the popup to the left or right. Regardless if you’re a righty or lefty, either side would be less obstructed than the bottom. It would be ideal if the interface was flipped – so the bar of skills are on the bottom instead of the top, and the popup could display unobstructed above the icon.

What other solutions are out there; I’m sure I’m missing some? Let me know in the comments below!

Related posts:

1. Three Strategies for Letting Gamers Access the World Map
2. Skyrim: Four Quick Thoughts on the UI’s Usability
3. Puzzle Craft: Good At Killing Time, Not Good At Usability

Anyway, now that I’ve made it to chapter 11 need the map to navigate the Archylte Steppe, I’ve discovered a peculiar missing feature: north. The game’s map doesn’t have any way to tell which direction you’re facing. Which is made especially hard because the map is constantly moving depending on which way you’re facing. It does have one big landmark to help you out, but even that isn’t clearly marked. Let’s talk about the map.

Problem 1: A rotating camera and a rotating map

Here’s the first problem: the map’s orientation isn’t fixed. It moves around, depending on which way the camera is facing. Imagine this sequence. 1) You look at your map. 2) Leaving the menu, you swing the camera 180 degrees so it’s facing your character. 3) You re-open the map. At this point, the map will have flipped upside down to match the camera.

Here, I made a quick YouTube video of this in action – make sure to keep an eye on the white ridge feature that’s right in the middle of the map.

Moral of the story, this makes it really disorienting when trying to locate anything, because it’s impossible to have any non-moving reference points.

Problem 2: No north, but an unexplained circle

So there’s no north on the map, which is constantly moving around depending on the camera angle. But let’s look at a (partial) list of areas within the Archylte Steppe:

• Western Benchland
• Central Expanse
• Northern Antrepass
• Eastern Tors
• Northern Highplain
• Southern Funnelway

(Source: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Archylte_Steppe#Areas)

Notice all the directions in the area titles? That would be a really convenient way to get a lay of the land…if you knew what any of the directions actually were, that is.

There is, however, a landmark that is designed (I assume anyway) to help navigate the Archylte Steppe. Here it is, on the map:

See that funny circle up at the top? That’s Cocoon. Notice how it’s not listed in the legend on the left either.

Here’s the problem: the game never tells the player what this represents. In fact, it represents Cocoon, a floating moon-like world that’s visible in the sky. Once I found that bit of information online, it does give the player a reference point that’s visible while wandering around, and can be used to make sure the map is in a consistent orientation.

Conclusion

Maps have been around for a long time, and north has been up since at least the time of Ptolemy nearly 2000 years ago. So this is a convention that you probably shouldn’t break unless there’s a really good reason, and I’m not finding one in Final Fantasy XIII.

In building a map for your game, think about what kind of problems you want the player to solve. Is getting lost a goal of the game? Does it add to the atmosphere or add tension in some way? Or is it only going to add another 10 hours onto the game as they mindlessly wander around trying to find the Eastern Tors? If you’re not trying to get the player lost, then put in a reasonable map system, along with what direction is north. It’s that easy.

So what do you think about the map in Final Fantasy XIII? Do you have any other examples of maps that are particularly good or bad? I’ve talked about the terrible map in the Witcher 2 before, I’m sure there are more examples out there. Give a shout out in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Final Fantasy XIII: A Great Loading Screen
2. Getting Lost in The Witcher 2: How Not to Build a Map
3. The Witcher 2: Five Ways that Dice Poker has a Miserable UI

The mobile game Quento (iTunes link, also quento.com) from Q42 features an exceptionally clever start screen that doesn’t teach the whole game, but it does a wonderful job at introducing the game’s core mechanic to the player. Finally, a game that doesn’t just want us to mindlessly “press start” for no good reason!

Here’s the title screen for Quento:

So before getting any information on what the game’s about, the player already knows how to play – how awesome is that? Of course, first time players do get some guidance in the form of a tutorial that progressively builds in complexity, but that’s not the point here. Quento took a potentially useless “tap to start” moment and made it an opportunity to constantly teach and reinforce how the game works.

Martin Kool of Q42 posted a really interesting comment on my last article about Quento, and he mentioned how this feature came about:

“This implementation followed after the initial feedback that -without something like this- you needed a person so tell you for the first time what to do, but not always a person is there to tell you, like when you simply download the game from an app store.”

Added bonus points: each level in Quento has a different vibrantly-colored background, and the colors that flash up on the start screen match the color of the current level. A classy touch.

What if other mobile games had their mechanic on the start screen?

While Quento has a simple enough mechanic that a single word – “swipe” – is all the player needs to hear, not all mobile games have the same luxury. Let’s look at some examples.

Puzzle Craft. It’s a match-3 style kingdom builder mashup. Thankfully this is a title screen you don’t see very often, because most of the time you’re popped right into your town. Anyway it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to have a simple match-3 sort of screen here, where the player has to swipe a finger across three pieces of wood or something. However, that’s not a great representation of what it’s actually like to play the game, so it might end up being a little bit weird.

Spaceteam (iTunes link) is a “cooperative party game” for iOS that is in the same family as the Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator. If you haven’t played it, it’s a bunch of yelling at other people in the room to press buttons, flip switches, and turn dials on their phones (and it’s awesome). It does have a start screen that features some game mechanics though – the player has to twist that dial all the way to play before the game fires up. As the dial turns, the background gets more intense too, matching the game’s intensity. Good stuff.

SimCity. So pretty clearly, I think a “start” button is the right choice for a complicated game like this. But it’s a fun design challenge, what kind of mechanic could you use to indicate you want to start a game of SimCity? Maybe connecting two points with power lines? Power lines aren’t as critical as roads are in SimCity, though connecting two roads with another road isn’t super exciting.

Angry Birds. How cool would it be if instead of the big, easy to hit, boring “play” button, you actually had to fling a bird into something to get started with Angry Birds? It might be amazing. But, if it requires some skill to even fire up the game, that’s probably a bad thing. I’m also not sure if the concept of slingshotting an Angry Bird is quite as universal as the concept of “swipe” (most likely, learned every time you unlock your phone).

Fruit Ninja. This is the best example of a game that teaches its mechanic on the start screen that I can think of. It’s a simple fruit-slice that’s displayed on a small piece of text as well as a quick animation to show users the way. And man is it satisfying to cut a watermelon in half with your finger!

Conclusion

If you can use your title screen to do something more than annoy or slow down users, it’s a good thing. Quento is a perfect example of giving users a little insight into the game as soon as possible. And it even helps reinforce how the title is spelled!

Are there other examples of this that you’ve seen in mobile games? Let me know in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Quento: Shaking My iPhone Makes Me Sad
2. Letterpress for iOS: Beautifully Simple
3. Mobile Games: Tutorials Should Fit Mobile Attention Spans

Failure is imminent.

As far as I can tell, Jakob Nielsen coined this term back in a 2009 Alertbox article titled “Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation“. The problem can occur in any kind of poorly designed hover menu – when you have a small label that displays a big menu on hover, if the mouse ends up temporarily outside the path of the active item, the menu will close.

Here, I recorded a short video of the situation in Origin…

<iframe width=”420″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/fnK5SytGsQE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen>

It’s not a deal-breaker, but man it’s irritating when you can’t get to a hover menu before it goes away. Origin has a serious case of the Diagonal Problem too, because the hover target (the giant game image) is so massive. To succeed in navigating the menu, you must be careful to guide the mouse over just the right path, and that only happens after three or four failures.

It’s even more irritating because there are a variety of ways to at least help the problem if not totally solve it. This UXMovement article called “Why Hover Menus Do More Harm Than Good” offers three different takes on a solution, and all of them involve clicking on the item to show the menu. That would work in Origin, although if you’re covering up other games with the menu, that might get a little annoying.

Another suggestion in the UXMovement article is to have the menu expand on click. This would be great in Origin – I’m thinking something like the new Google Image Search layout. Clicking on a game image would expand the space between games with the hover content.

In the Jakob Nielsen article mentioned above, he suggests to make the hover menu stick around a little bit longer to give users a bit of wiggle room if they are making a diagonal move across the screen. Actually he says this:

“The very best implementations can sense when a user is moving the pointer from the navbar item to a destination within the drop-down” -Jakob Nielsen, Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation

So telling a system to “sense” this seems a bit fuzzy, but if you can figure that out more power to you. I suppose you could do some magic to tell if the mouse was headed diagonally towards the hover menu, which would make for one heck of a sexy menu if you got it right.

One final example comes from Steam. Steam bypasses the problem by not having only two items appear on hover, and they appear inside the image itself. One is either “install” or “play”, and the other is “details”. This really breaks it down into the two most important actions that a user could take – either let me play the game, or…anything else I want to do.

Conclusion

I know people have a lot of beef with Origin over much bigger topics than this one. But regardless it’s frustrating to see these small and easily fixable details get overlooked. Hopefully someday the Origin client will get a bit of UI love.

So I haven’t spent a ton of time messing around in Origin; what’s the rest of the interface like? Or, are there other examples of simple usability problems that you see crop up in other interfaces? Let’s talk in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Diablo 3: Auction House Usability is Hellish
2. League of Legends: Menu Madness
3. Diablo 3: More Auction House Usability Issues