DESIGNER’S NOTES

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DESIGNER’S NOTES #2 – 

GAME ORIENTATION

When we started thinking about Brass for tablets the very first question that 

popped into our minds was: how we will fit the huge Brass board into a small 

tablet screen? Not surprisingly, one of our earliest design decisions was about 

the display orientation. This section will tell you how we decided on the

 orientation for the mobile version of Brass.

PORTRAIT VS LANDSCAPE

To get better insight about the game, we started talking to Brass players. 

The feedback we received confirmed our own experience: to play Brass 

effectively, you need a full board overview. Expert Brass players

 (200+ games recorded) tend to use cards to plan their strategy. 

That is because they are perfectly familiar with the board, and they have it 

memorized. However, for beginners the board is the main way to plan strategy. 

We wanted the game to be accessible for everyone, so we decided that the full

 board overview is important for us.

The second thing we wanted to handle with care is usability. Nothing is more 

frustrating than trying to touch a tiny square surrounded by other squares in the 

middle of the map, and accidentally touching the wrong one.

This gave us two goals to fulfill when designing the game orientation:

1. It should be possible to view the whole map at once.
2. It should be easy to use the map.

PORTRAIT

When you lay out the boardgame version of Brass, you immediately notice 

that it has portrait orientation. This is even more visible when you remove the

 left part of the board, which is not part of the map. That is why our first 

attempt was with portrait mode.

Here is what it looked like:

The board fits very nicely on the iPad screen, but there are some problems:

• The building slots are bit too small to be touched comfortable. They are 90×90 pixels, while
•  the recommended size is 140×140 pixels. This means that the game could be played on iPad 
• size devices, but on smaller devices like iPad Mini, the slots would have to be 50% bigger 
• compared to what they are now.
• There is no space left for other User Interface (UI) elements (buttons, tabs and menus). 
• The map fills the screen completely, and we would have to make the board even smaller in order
•  to make some room for UI controls.

PORTRAIT WITH ZOOM

The 2nd approach was to enlarge the board so the building slots are large 

enough to use comfortably. Here is the result:

Now it is comfortable to touch a building slot, but it creates two problems:

• We can’t see the whole map at once; you have to scroll the board to be able to play. 
• However this means we can put UI wherever we want and just scroll the board underneath it.
• The board scrolls in two dimensions.

LANDSCAPE

Next we tried landscape mode:

Now we have nice big building slots that are easy to use, but we still have 

a problem:

• You have to scroll the map. (But at least you scroll in only one dimension.

THE SOLUTION

As you can see, no orientation is perfect. To make things worse, the best 

orientation depends on the size of the device in use.

The first thing we did was to add zoom support to the game. That was easy and 

eliminated a lot of problems. If you play on very small device like a phone, then you need to zoom and do a lot of scrolling, but the game is still usable. If you play on a tablet, then you have the best experience – you do not have to zoom, and the amount of scrolling is minimal.

This still left us with the choice of portrait vs landscape. From the usability perspective, landscape mode has a huge advantage: the scrolling is only in one dimension, and you can play comfortably even on smaller devices like phones. This is a huge gain from the usability perspective, and our initial tests confirmed that.

But we also liked the full board overview of portrait mode. This mode works

 great on iPad-size devices.

We wanted to have it all. That is why we added support for dynamic device

 rotation. This is unusual for a game, but this allows you turn the device in any

 direction and still play the game. You can use it comfortably in landscape 

mode on almost any device, or you can try the portrait mode that gives the better map overview and no scrolling, if you do not mind the smaller UI.

SUMMARY

The game orientation may seem a simple question, but we took it very seriously. We could have just gone with portrait mode and allowed zooming and panning in all directions. That would be easy.

 However we wanted to deliver the best possible gameplay experience for all 

devices, and we went the extra mile to do things right.

Source from Brass

Guide To Interface Design for iPad and iPhone Games

     SAN FRANCISCO — “The iPad is not an iPhone,” says game designer Graeme Devine.

Well, that’s obvious. It’s the size of a book. and you can’t call your mom with it (at least not out of the box). So why do so many game designers take iPhone games, increase the graphical fidelity, and drop them onto the tablet?

It’s hard to blame game developers for taking the easy solution and porting existing content: After all, even this quick-and-dirty process has resulted in several great iPad games. And with the iPad’s success far from preordained at the tablet’s launch, it might have seemed irresponsible to sink too much time and effort into development for the platform last year.

But things are changing. Apple has sold more than 15 million iPads already, and that number is about to jump with the release of its second-generation tablet next week. With a beefier dual-core processor and a rumored bump in RAM, the next iPad should be even better for high-quality game experiences.

Will developers start creating games that truly take advantage of its unique strengths?

“Touch is the best game interface we have available today,” said Devine at the Game Developers Conference here Tuesday, and the iPad is “the best gaming device on the planet.” Devine, a game-design legend whose credits include the groundbreaking CD-ROM game The 7th Guest and Microsoft’s Halo Wars, spent a year at Apple working on iOS games. He’s since left the company to concentrate on his own titles, but he remains one of Apple’s biggest evangelists in the gaming world.

In his talk at the annual developers’ confab, Devine said that what makes the tablet experience so unique is its ability to create a certain kind of “reality.”

The game Let’s Create! Pottery HD opened Devine’s eyes to how subtle elements could make iPad games feel real. The pottery-making game uses the iPad’s accelerometer to move the background of the screen. Shift the position of the iPad and the game’s background shifts to match it.

“That little tilt made it feel all the more real,” Devine said.

Designing tablet games to take into account the way players will hold and manipulate the device is key, he said, and it’s why he can’t stand to see developers simply porting their iPhone games to iPad.

Epic Games’ Infinity Blade for iOS isn’t exclusive to iPad. The $7 sword-fighting game includes versions for both phone and tablet. Although the iPad version benefits from a few gameplay tweaks, the overarching design makes it well-suited for the bigger device.

“One of our core design philosophies was that the whole game had to be playable with one finger,” said Donald Mustard, co-founder of Infinity Bladedeveloper Chair Entertainment, in an interview with Wired.com at GDC. Players can cover up so much of the iPhone screen with their hands, he said, that Chair wanted to make sure they saw Infinity Blade‘s gorgeous graphics, which are rendered with Epic’s Unreal Engine 3.

As it turned out, being able to play the game with one finger made it perfect for tablet play. Since players have to hold the heavier, larger iPad by cradling it in one hand, games are far more comfortable if they work one-handed.

“If you want people to be comfortable playing for more than 30 seconds, you have to think about how people hold the machine in their hands,” said Devine.

Another Devine commandment that Mustard agreed with: Thou shalt not make a fake joystick on the screen.

“You know what the iPad doesn’t come with? It doesn’t come with a joystick. So why [would] you do that?” said Devine. Putting a virtual joystick on the screen, or otherwise designing a control scheme that emulates a traditional controller, is just telling the player that your game would be more fun on another console, he said.
Source from wired

Mobile App Trends Today

“What's Next?” is always the most common question about business, customer satisfaction with the help of digital device, which the business ask themselves to keep afloat their business.  They are keen to embrace the power of emerging technologies.

It is important to know the seeds of evolution and outline the top mobile marketing trends that will leave their mark on future strategy.

In the present mobile and web world, smartphone has become so relevant and doing business through mobile phone can’t be considered just another channel.

Mobile technology beats the time of our daily lives and reshapes the most critical touch points in the new customer journey.  The constant changes in customer use of digital channels and new technologies are USP to understanding trends in marketing.

What businesses know certainly is that the purchase decision is getting more and more complex.  Customer behavior adds new complexity.  Today’s marketing initiatives will soon become outdated, inefficient and irrelevant.

The mobile device usage and mobile marketing will continue to grow.

Mobile platforms now account for 60% of total time spent on digital media. (ComScore)

Mobile commerce is expected to grow up to 25 percent of the total e-commerce sales by the end of 2017.

50%  of customers believe mobile is the most important resource in their purchase decision-making.

Smartphones made the users literally submerged in a digital world, and we depend on mobile to live, work, explore the world, connect with brands and product.

For the businesses this implies an unprecedented opportunity to understand customers, learn from their behavior and build genuine engagement.  All this by providing experiences that add value to their life and are really meaningful to them.

Customer experience is the main differentiator in the race for relevance,  Mobile app is the secret weapon to engage effectively digital customers at every touch point of their relationship with your business.

As a business, it is your priority to reach your customers where and when it matters most, with context-aware and personalized contents.

At present mobile marketing trend focus on the enhancement of connection between brands and people, to streamline the process, empower customers and ultimately provide relevant digital customer experiences.

Taking note of the most popular trends that will dominate from 2016 on, you will be sure to develop a successful long-term strategy through mobile.

Google Indexing: App & Mobile

Search Engine Optimisation ensures mobile-friendly online presence.  A well-designed mobile app enhances mobile-first (if not mobile-only) marketing strategy. This trend will accelerate in the next years, when indexing will be more and more a matter of “think mobile, act local”.

Ads: Social Media, App & Video

It is believed emergence of ad-blocking software and add-ons are not on the card in the near future and ad-on mobile appears to be the only lifeline.

Proximity Marketing

It is challenging for businesses to recognize the uniqueness of any single digital customer, each with peculiar habits, needs and desires.  In the past few years, companies have started testing and implementing location based services that help retrieve information about the current location of customers/prospects.

Proximity marketing is the name of this new methodology to encourage specific behaviors and facilitate the purchase decision.  Location-based marketing services will grow even more in 2016, providing innovative ways for marketers to connect the online experience with the retail store.

Wearables & Internet Of Things

The store as we all know is destined to disappear very soon, replaced by a smart shop that engages customers and implement all sorts of intelligent technologies: wearables and the Internet of Things devices represent the forefront of this revolution.  With more customers using smartwatches, activity trackers, and other inter-communicating objects, marketers will be able to more accurately pinpoint locations and deliver highly targeted contents.

Mobile Apps for Happy Customers

Businesses always dream of having happy and loyal customer in their kitty and they leave no stone unturned towards this end and to have greater engagement with customers and to enhance customer experience.  Mobile Apps and Web Apps are boon to that end.

Towards to this end they employ many innovative and creative channels, one such channel is mobile engagement, for many of the businesses, this is the missing link that will enable them to get closer to the customers.  It is of foremost importance for businesses to harness the power of mobile apps to positively change the customer experience to gain an edge over the competition.

Smartphone acts like our personal metronome that sets the pace of daily routine.  Our dependence on devices are so immense today to the extent that we strongly rely on mobile devices and apps to carry out the most diverse activities such as playing, communicating, socializing, and buying to name a few

.

It is found out that::

More than 75% of all online adults of the most developed countries now have a smartphone.

Mobile searches on Google have now overtaken desktop searches.

Time spent on apps now account for 80% of the total time spent on mobile devices.

Businesses are increasingly turning to use mobile apps to interact and connect with customers.  Apps are not just a way to ‘be there’.  They can be the perfect mean to engage with customers, reach them when and where it matters most, sell products and increase revenue.

Recent findings reveal that apps represent a unique opportunity to build a deeper relationship with customers.  As the number of competitors continues to grow it is necessary to avoid the backlash of bad mobile app development and stop that the mobile app or web app ultimately disappears in the host of others in app stores.

‘Be different’is the secret to achieving sustainable growth in the expanding global market.  This is indeed is the biggest challenge.  The brands need to overcome the rise of e-commerce and mobile commerce, reinventing the very idea of store to reach customers when they are ready to take decisions.  Fashion and luxury brands probably have the hardest task because they have to use the technology and they have to maintain legacy and their traditional identity.

Only an amazing experience can make customers happy.  Happy and satisfied customerss put positive word of mouth and pave the way to customer advocacy.  In a few words, they create the foundations to drive market share and revenue growth.

More and more businesses are uploading their branded apps to the stores, but they are doing so because everyone else is doing it.  They do not come out with mobile applications that is end user centric.

Accessibility via mobile devices is top priority but, in the end, it is not the ‘what,’ but ‘why’ and ‘how’ are the key factors of success.

Following points are some tips to harness the power of mobile apps to fulfill customer’s desires, and live with them happily.

Assure Convenience

Mobile app is the perfect tool to engage customers in the exact (micro) moment that matters most.  To work efficiently, your app must be smart, personalized and contextual.

Play With Customers

Gamification dynamics helps to engage customers and keep them coming back to your app and store.

Creation ‘Appmosphere’

Bring together customer engagement and brand identity together by creating unique Mobile App Atmosphere.

Develop A Human Brand

Opening a two-way dialogue with endusers can be used to improve the connection, get feedback, respond to issues, and ultimately show the human face of your company.

Make Full Use of Data Power

Mobile apps serve as collectors of information about customers, their social habits and purchase behaviors.  If businesses know to read them they will get a better understanding of customers and apply suitable strategies.