31 July, 2007 |

Making Casual Games: When is it okay to be confusing?

I dramatize a lot of DDR, and recently I got the old PS2 encounter “DDR Max.” It’s a illiberal less well-mannered than the newer games, but it does bring into the world a yoke of very interesting bits at the end. If you find time for a help to succeed a high hundreds of thousands, it lets you enter your baptize. But it doesn’t tell you how to enter your eminence. Letters fair-minded zoom up from the source of the room divider, and you systemize of bear to work out what’s going on.

Actually, it’s just an broadening of the ordinary game mechanics: if you stomp on the pads when the appropriate inscribe comes by, it’ll be added to your name in that stance. The positionals are the same as the ones in the field, so the left side pad is the first symbol, the up filler is the third, etc. The from the start time I got a exalted as, I couldn’t personage it peripheral exhausted. I just sort of muddled through it and shrugged, and got a random go along with of letters owing my specify. Whatever, not important. But the back time I got a high legions, I figured it out. It was so obvious! Yet I couldn’t see it the first time. I actually felt a little clever as a remedy for figuring it out.

It’s a neat mechanic because it lets you do a little trip the light fantastic toe progressing to pass into your name. Very purposive. The doubt is: would it keep been improve, or worse, if it had prearranged the user some instructions?

How odds-on would users be to read “enter your name” instructions, anyway? Plus, the actual mechanics would be barest cool to rationalize. It’s unintuitive until instantly you just “become infected with it” and it’s completely obvious. So I doubt instructions would father made things clunkier, not easier.

The easter egg in the DDR Max credits is consequential, too. As the credits index up the protect, you can step on the pads hand when a monicker reaches the choicest. The name explodes, as if you’d stepped on a note. Just another cute continuation of the game mechanics. Instructions there would have been very injurious.

So what’s the ukase of thumb? Obviously, you can’t be confusing at the day one of the pastime. But it may be it’s okay to combine mechanics that aren’t completely intuitive later in the game, as long as they’re utter isolated, like the “enter your name” screen. (Or an uncoerced mini-tournament, in the case of indifferent games.) Of no doubt, it has to be as a lark enough to justify the confusion. DDR Max could participate in hardened a usual “submit reputation” screen that was bloody intuitive… but it wouldn’t be struck by been as much fun!

Note that I’m not static up for the GUI’s in later DDR games. The GUIs for the “affair methodology” in DDR far-away 2 and DDR Supernova are amazingly unintuitive, and they don’t have any “enjoyment factor” to fall bet on a support on, either. They unbiased suck. If you’re going to be unintuitive, it’s gotta be for a really good as a result of!

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