Usability Lessons from Mobile Board Game Conversions – Notes & References

I gave this talk at GDC (Game Developers Conference) 2014.

Update: Note that the talk was recorded, and you can now watch the video (and slides!) on the GDC Vault.

Here are some notes:

(The numbers below correspond with the side number.)

1. This talk was adapted from a previous talk I gave at Mobile March in 2013, titled Case Studies in Mobile Board Game Conversion (2013). That talk was much more about features of three games in particular, Carcassonne, Ascension, and For the Win.

2. This slide contains a screenshot from Doom (1993), the book cover for Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (a book by David Kushner about id Software), and a movie poster for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (from 1984):
Notably, it contains no gloom.
Notably, it contains no gloom.Notably, it contains no gloom.


4. I wanted to include a photo here of a glass bead game, or maybe glass chess set, but didn’t find a good one.

5. In case you haven’t played it, here is QWOP.

8. Arnold Lund’s Usability Maxims were first published in 1997. “Expert ratings of usability maxims. Ergonomics in Design, 5(3), 15-20. A study of the heuristics design experts consider important for good design.” @ArnieLund Oddly enough, this list of “maxims” used to appear on the Wikipedia article for Usability, but was removed before I gave this talk. (Not by me!) Here’s another site that has them: http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/lunds-expert-ratings-of-usability-maxims

9. Unfortunately, as of this writing, the For The Win application created for Tasty Minstrel Games appears to be no longer available in the app store.

10. I mention here that Usability is a two-way street, even though it is generally thought of as the player communicating with the application, it is far more relevant what the application communicates to the player. This first section is titled “Usability Lessons for the Game Screen: Effectively communicating game information to your player”, and features the following recommendations / lessons, giving each its own slide.

  • Highlight possible actions.
  • Clearly show whose turn it is.
  • Always animate AI turns.
  • Hide “extra” information.
  • Provide linear context.

11. This slide features a screenshot from Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, put out by Playdek.

12. The screenshot here is Carcassonne, by the Coding Monkeys, which I call out as the “gold standard” of iOS board game conversions.

13. Here is a screenshot for Day’s of Wonder’s excellent Ticket To Ride application.

14. More screenshots from Ascension and Carcassonne.

15. Here is another screenshot from Carcassonne, as well as, in the foreground, a screenshot from Suburbia, put out by Jeremiah Maher.

16. This introduces a brief section on gestures and the other half of the picture, allowing the player to communicate back into the game.

17. More Carcassonne and Ascension screenshots. I recommend you support both tap and drag when drag makes sense as a gesture. Tap and drag are the two gestures you probably don’t need to explain in detail.

18. Here is a screenshot from Playdek’s latest masterpiece, Lords of Waterdeep. I talk about other gestures that probably do need to be explained: double-tap, long-press, and swipe. As well as some classes of gesture that I recommend not using at all: Triple (or more) tap, and multi-finger drag/swipe.

19 & 20. I’m not sure I feel like I managed to get my points across about undo and confirmation buttons. Essentially, undo is a good idea, and if you have complex actions, you should always give your user a confirmation step. I guess what I feel less certain about having effectively communicated is WHY those are important. Screenshots from Ascension and Carcassonne.

22. Here is a screenshot from Reiner Knizia’s Samurai (developed by Conlan Rios), as well as another from Carcassonne and For The Win.

23. Screenshots here to illustrate Game Center’s GKTurnBasedMatchmakerViewController, from Reiner Knizia’s Qin, and Cafe International by Application Systems Heidelberg.

UPDATE #1: Here’s a direct link to download the slides: Usability Lessons from Mobile Board Game Conversions (9MB PDF)

UPDATE #2: (2014-03-24) I added additional notes as well as the original session description and takeaway from the GDC Schedule.

UPDATE #3: (2016-05-10) I added a link at the beginning of this post to the video recording of the talk, which is available to watch for free at the GDC Vault.

Session Description
Martin Grider looks at user interface specifics related to touchscreen ports of modern board games. He examines common touch interface paradigms that have emerged in the genre, making in-depth examination of some particularly good mobile board game conversions from the perspective of their UX and UI decisions. Martin also talks about working with Tasty Minstrel Games on the For The Win board game application for iOS in 2012.

Takeaway
The following questions are addressed: What interface elements and control schemes are useful for board game conversion? What UX paradigms apply to board game interactions in mobile, particularly as they apply to the game screen and multiplayer game creation screens? How do these lessons apply to all mobile game development?

Case Studies in Mobile Board Game Conversion

I did a talk yesterday at Mobile March about Mobile Board Game Conversions. I basically just ran through three example applications, Carcassonne (BGG, App Store), Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer (BGG, App Store), and For The Win (BGG, App Store), showing them off while paying attention to features and aspects of the applications that highlight decisions the developers had to make while making these conversions. I didn’t end up following the slides as much as I’d done in my run-throughs (things never go how you plan), but here the slides are for posterity anyway:

Customizing iOS UI: Fonts, Controls, and Color

I had the opportunity to present at the local iDev Meetup last month, and am only just now getting around to posting the slide deck for the talk, which I called creatively, Customizing iOS UI: Fonts, Controls, and Color. You should be able to view the slides below.

The source code for the talk is also available, and on most of the slides, you’ll see some text along the lines of demo-1, demo-2, etc. Those are the git tags that I used to fast forward my code to the relevant part of the talk. (Thought that needed explaining.)

Enjoy!

Action Puzzle Games

I presented the following slides on Action Puzzle Games tonight at the MN Mobile Game Dev Group. I’m not sure the slides are really enough to convey the meaning, but most of this is really just a list of good Action Puzzle Games for iOS, and I said I’d post those, so here they are.

Special thanks to Jesper Juul, from whose amazing article (“Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games”) I stole the Family Tree of matching tile games.

Introduction to iPhone Game Development

I had the pleasure last week of presenting this talk twice, first for the local meetup.com iPhone developer group, and a second time the following Saturday at MinneBar. Here are the slides from the event, embedded for your pleasure:

For the talk, John Hibshire and I also created a spreadsheet listing all the iPhone game frameworks, libraries and SDKs we could find. I’m going to try and keep this data up-to-date, and add any additional projects as I find out about them.

I think my session was recorded, possibly by folks at the Uptake, but I have no idea if that recording is online (as a few others from the event are). If it was, I’ll definitely update this post to link to it, since these slides are pretty useless without my running commentary. There are some nice links in a “Resources” section in the last few slides, so you can enjoy those if nothing else.

UPDATE: I just posted a link to the sample code for this talk on github in a new blog post. The code shows various examples of how to do really basic things in Cocos2D, including using the schedule method to create a game loop, using the CCMenu class, drawing various particle types, and finally, how to write tetris in Objective-C using a Cocos2D texture atlas for the different piece types.