[Kde-games-devel] kbattleship and welcome screen

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 12 June 2007, Paolo Capriotti wrote:
> After a number of failed attempts and experiment, I'm starting to be a bit
> dubious about the whole 'welcome screen' thing [1] [2].

if it's at all reassuring, i think it's exactly the right approach for things 
like games.

> However, many games (including kbattleship) require to user to enter
> additional information before the game can actually be started. For
> example, in kbattleship, when playing over the network, one has to pick a
> nickname, and enter the tcp connection parameters.
> All these additional things tend to complicate the welcome screen
> interface, pushing it to the point where normal gui controls are needed,
> thus breaking the integration with the game graphics, making flicker-free
> animations practically impossible and requiring a lot of programming
> effort, which is essentially wheel reinvention in many aspects (resizing,
> layouting, handling mouse events...).

this sounds a lot like perfection-until-its-broken syndrome. 

> Plus, the controls are inconsistent with the kde style, and do not use
> system colors. I agree that this may not be a problem for a game, but in
> this particular case, we're not strictly dealing with a game, but with
> the 'initial configuration' needed for a game to be started, which is imho
> quite a different context, and I think that in this case fancy graphics,
> albeit nice, probably get in the way.

nah, games are supposed to fun. the fancy graphics don't get in the way but 
make the experience generally better. trying to overintellectualize the 
affair and say "but now we're getting user information, so it's not really a 
game at this moment of execution" is probably off the mark for games and 
edutainment apps. for productivity apps? sure. games? c'mon. they're *games* 
=)

> On a side note, I've tried a particular approach (double menu, see the
> screenshot in [2]) while integrating KWelcomeScreen in kbattleship, and it
> resulted in a gross failure: even one of our game developers had troubles
> figuring out how to start a network game!

this is pretty easily solved with some information on mouse over. the issue 
with the kbattleship welcome screen is that it provides very little 
information to the user; for instance it doesn't direct the user to pick the 
type of game, it doesn't direct the user to "now start placing your ships", 
etc. "You" should probably be "Human Player" or something like that. iow, i'd 
take this either to a usability person or just take your laptop to some 
friends, have them play around with it and tell you what they are doing and 
thinking as they do it. ask them to do some basic tasks; record what goes on 
and tweak based on that.

i'd also recommend for the widget issues with network game to simply pop up 
a "regular" widget at that point.

but please, keep those intro screens. they are beautiful and make it soooo 
easy to start a game quickly.

heck, if it would make a difference i'm willing to find a few hours to sit on 
irc with you and hack on stuff?

> That's not the main point of my rambling, though. The interface can be
> simplified, and we already started working on this, but imho even a
> simplified interface will have the flaws I've tried to describe here.
> My proposal is to forget about integrated welcome screens, at least for
> kbattleship, and to add a normal dialog acting as a welcome screen (like
> ksudoku, iirc).

well, ksudoku's entry screen is not a very good example. it presents 2 
groupboxes (nested!) with 6 widgets just to go in an play a simple game... 
it -feels- heavy. kbattleship also provides 6 widgets but it feels fun and 
easy. the latter is certainly what the games should be aiming for, imho.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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