The new quick start guide
Hi all, first of all: Gaming_pepper is giving away invites at his channel. Unfortunately, interest is a bit lower than expected, so chances of actually winning an invite (and thus playing without having to wait) are quite large:
All right, back to business. You might remember that one of the most important results of my email survy to newly invited testers was that [players seemed to be confused about the controls and how to start, and if they got that, they were confused on what to do next]. In the current version of Olvand, I'm trying to fix that by showing new players (players with no achievements yet) four illustrated instructions. I already showed the first one before two weeks ago, here are all of them:
There you go, everything you need to know to play the game in just four sentences. And because animation is so easy in my new graphics engine, they're animated as well:
Cool huh? The big question is, of course... does it work? I'm going to send out another wave of emails in a few weeks to be sure, but the [highscore] at least suggests it does. I'm watching it from day to day, and I see a lot more activity there than is usual after a wave of new invites, which suggests that more players get more than just a few basic achievements. I should add, though, that the Big Book about Crafting (an in-game overview of all basic crafting recipies) might also be a reason for this, but, well, that's okay too :).
Helping out the builders
And talking about implementing things that are much easier with my new graphics engine, this thing that will be part of the next update:
This is the UI window of a construction site, where you drop the items needed to build something. A recent [video by Gaming_pepper] again reminded me what a pain it is to build larger constructions with this system. Sure, the blueprint tells you you need 10 of that and 8 of that... but how do you know whether you've put enough of those on the site? So far, the only way to know this was by simply pointing your finger at your screen and counting it by hand, which is neither elegant nor user friendly, in particular when you realize counting stuff is one of the main things computers are good at. To fix this, the items you still need are now displayed transparantly next to the items you already have. I've used it myself 30 or 40 times now, and it's really a relief!
If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].
