…morra horrivelmente (translation: play beautifully, die horribly). In other words, I’m really excited about the world cup, and wanted to find some way of injecting that in somewhere.  (My money is on Portugal, but if they fall over too much I’m jumping ship.)

I have been a huge pain in the ass to David and Nick over the last day or so.

Much of the (incredibly useful) feedback we’ve been getting has been rolling around in my brain, and the first solutions to issues that I think of are often the ones that I originally thought of (if I ever noticed them) and we abandoned because they were unworkable. Forcing yourself to think of multiple ways to attack a problem instead of getting attached to one is one of the biggest hurdles in game design I’ve yet to come across.

I’ve also been watching Youtube videos of the most immersive games I can think of in an effort to dissect their UI for feedback systems that we’re not using and could be.  My favorite culprits so far: Mega Man X, Street Fighter 4, and WoW.  They may not be dungeon crawlers, but I can’t think of a single dungeon crawler that’s really done a UI right. They always feel like someone squeezing a little too much into a minimalist space, or they take up so much room to do the UI properly that you’re left with a tiny window into the game universe which feels like you’re staring in through a window rather than being in it (see: The Bard’s Tale, Everquest).  Funny how the old games had the giant user interfaces and lack of immersion but the new games assume you’ll be able to learn a woefully unintuitive system so that they can make it small.

Our UI is FAR from perfect, but hey, we’re working on it, and thanks for telling us what sucks!