Developer Blog: Interface Design
Posted on 6th Aug 2010 at 10:24 by Mode 7 with 6 comments
I’m going to step out of my chronology of Frozen Synapse this week and talk briefly about what’s going on around here at the moment.
One of the major difficulties with the game is giving the player a vast amount of control over his units while still retaining a clear and clean interface: it’s something we’ve struggled with throughout development.
Our first real stab at tidying up the game came when we took it to the University of Reading for some focus testing. We had a batch of brilliant (and very patient) Computer Science students play the game for a few hours while we watched and talked to them about the problems they were having. It was encouraging that they all rated the game very highly, but there’s nothing like observing someone struggling to make a unit do something to bring home the fact that you need to make some changes!
One of the major difficulties with the game is giving the player a vast amount of control over his units while still retaining a clear and clean interface: it’s something we’ve struggled with throughout development.
Our first real stab at tidying up the game came when we took it to the University of Reading for some focus testing. We had a batch of brilliant (and very patient) Computer Science students play the game for a few hours while we watched and talked to them about the problems they were having. It was encouraging that they all rated the game very highly, but there’s nothing like observing someone struggling to make a unit do something to bring home the fact that you need to make some changes!
