Posts Tagged ‘games’
Quake Matrix Retrospective
This year is the tenth anniversary of Quake Matrix. Quake Matrix was a mod for the original Quake, based on the film The Matrix, in which I contributed to the level creation. Starting as a small project among school friends, we went on to have considerable success, featuring on the popular (at the time) PlanetQuake website, and receiving thousands of downloads.
Today I’m going to look back on Quake Matrix, and what we learnt while developing the mod. You’ll have to excuse this post for not being particularly usability/UX focused, but it was the early 2000’s – games usability didn’t exist back then… (jokes!)
Quake Matrix
multi.player Conference Review – Social Interaction, Bartle and Orcs!
I’ve just got back from a few days in Hohenheim, at the multi.player conference, and wanted to share my experiences. The conference was on “The social aspects of digital gaming”, and was a fantastic chance to meet people working in a similar field to myself.
The talk Pejman and I gave, on measuring social interaction in collocated gaming sessions, seemed to be really well received, and has received some insightful comments. I was a bit worried before about presenting an application of the Bartle Test to the man himself, however he didn’t seem to complain (much…). The research gave a better insight into how different player types react in collocated sessions, and hence was distinct from the other presentations – we also had a strong link to industry!
Usability Fail – Worms (and Worms 2)
I’ve recently been getting back into both Worms and Worms 2 on the iPhone, largely due to the Bluetooth enabled multiplayer mode. Worms, for those who don’t remember was a hugely popular turn-based shooter in the nineties, and the 1995 original was the first game I bought on the PC!
Classic Worms
However the iOS port has made a huge usability sin with its misuse of icons. Today I’ll look at what the problem is, and how it could be resolved.
Erik Rothoff Andersson (Kick Ass) on testing with users & why you shouldn’t listen to what users say!
Erik Andersson is the creator of Kick Ass, the new iPhone game based on his hit web-app. Kick-Ass is an adaption of asteroids that allows you to attack your favourite (or least favourite) websites, destroying them with a selection of ships, while earning achievements.
The iOS game can be downloaded here, and the original bookmark-let is available to play for free
Kick Ass in action...
Today Erik tells us about his experiences with finding testers, getting user feedback, and why you should look at what people do, and not what they say!
Click to continue…
The 5 secrets to happy players with Agile Games Development
Agile software development offers a fantastic opportunity to integrate user insight into the game development process, leading to better games. In this post, I’ll cover the main methods that can be used to integrate user insight into agile games development, and why this is important.
