Plan for Keith Johnston

IGC Rocked

IGC 03' was fantastic. It was great once again to meet with such a group of dedicated gamers.

I really appreciated those who played TubeTwist, and your feedback will definitely change the direction we will take the game. IGC provided a great usability lab for testing the game, and I realize now that the game has too steep a learning curve.

The most frustrating thing for me was to watch someone start up the game, play around with it, and then exit - not having even played the game. Lesson learned - make the first levels of a puzzle so trivial that all you have to do is push a single button to 'go'. :-)

The best thing was that the two things we had concentrated on in the last few weeks - the camera controls and the look of the tubes, seemed to be well received. I think the areas we need to concentrate on for the final release are:
- ordering the puzzles so the 2-D puzzles come first
- fixing the piece placement bugs
- making it easier to place new pieces: switch from drag and drop to select-and-click, and show where the new piece will go before the user clicks on it
- clean up the UI so that the controls are even more obvious

I loved Jeff's slide from the keynote: "If you don't innovate, you're dead, and if you do innovate, you're dead". I know that what we are trying to do in TubeTwist is new - we just have to work to make it not "too new".

Keith