What Do You Think Of The New M.I.High?

MyAdventureGame - What do you think of our new Alpha site? (Game Player, #1)

• Greetings Researchers & Readers: _About These Questions_ It has been far too long since we've posted on this wonderful service! We've got a new series of questions related to the newest version (4.0) of our web site, and really hope you guys can help us out. Hopefully these questions/tasks will be fun! Oh, and no fair answering identical questions ? feel free to answer different, but not the same! _About The MyAdventureGame.com Project _ MyAdventureGame.com is a website dedicated to playing, creating, and sharing Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style games. The people behind MyAdventureGame.com (us) created the site as a hobby and to have a fun learning experience. Because of this, we have no real budget or anything like that, which is directly reflected in the questions' $-to-time ratios. But, we hope to make up it for fun. The current live website has some more information if you're interested. _About The New Version _ Being never satisfied, we've decided to complete redo the entire website - from giving it a slightly cleaner interface to using an industrial strength 3-tier ASP.NET web application (in our humble opinion). Currently, we're in the Alpha stages, which we define as having enough functionality to determine if the design/interface will work. Expect broken links and errors, but don't worry about reporting them unless we specifically request in the Question. _And Finally, The Questions_ For this question, we'd like you to tell us what you think of the new Game-Playing web page. To do this, you'll need to play a few games. Ugh, such a challenge, we know. You don't have to beat the games (although, it may be personally rewarding, giving you a nice warm feeling of accomplishment if you do). Some games utilize inventory items -- it is important that you check out a game with this. It's also important that you see how it works on the current site too. We've provided links to games that utilize inventory items. How does the game play experience differ from the current game player to the new? Do you find the separate game window (styled much differently) helpful? What do you think of the way Inventory is handled in the Current vs. New? What do you think of putting the "Back Button" in the drop down menu? Do you use the Back function often? Did you encounter any ugly asp.net server errors (this portion should be mostly error free)? ? so we just asked a whole bunch of questions, but we're just trying to explain what we're thinking. You don't have to explicitly answer each question, but try to have your response answer what we're generally asking. _Links_ Current Site: http://www.MyAdventureGame.com Alpha Site: http://Mag.Papadimoulis.com Wal-Mart Game (Current): http://www.myadventuregame.com/preview.asp?G=253Wal-Mart Game (Alpha): http://mag.papadimoulis.com/games/game.aspx?253 Finals Week (Current): http://www.myadventuregame.com/preview.asp?G=8 Finals Week (Alpha): http://mag.papadimoulis.com/games/game.aspx?8 The Black Hand (Current): http://www.myadventuregame.com/preview.asp?g=327 The Black Hand (Alpha): http://mag.papadimoulis.com/games/game.aspx?327 Note: Black hand written by GA's own easterangel-ga! (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=105275) _Closing_ Please accept our apologies for the novella of a question. But, understand that we want to be as concise as possible, and explain exactly what we're looking for, and try to make sense of why we're asking such atypical questions. Also, we really appreciate your help. Everyone on this site has been very helpful in the past, so thanks in advance! Sincerely, The MyAdventureGame.com Team

• Answer:

  myadventuregame-ga, What a fun question! I fired up each of the games you linked to below, and checked out both versions of your main page, using both versions. I hope my comments on your new game play interface will be useful to you. At first glance, the new user interface is a great improvement. The separate play screen reinforces the feeling of playing a distinct game, as opposed to browsing a website. The austere page design and lack of non-game links on this page also helps isolate gameplay from the game select screen. I also like having the ability to view the description and player comments for a game, without having to exit the game itself. The new inventory management system is very good. While I was playing the Wal*Mart Game under the current interface, I became a little bit annoyed with having to go back and forth between the separate inventory screen and the game text screens. This was especially frustrating in areas where I wanted to try each of my items, to see which might have an effect. The new screen streamlines this process, allowing me to Look at or Use each object without loading a different screen. The new inventory system is almost perfect, though I did encounter a few creaky areas. I would suggest a slight change to the behavior that occurs when the user clicks on one of the items. Currently, the new inventory system only displays information for one item at a time, and the user must click "Return To My Inventory" to view subsequent items. I would prefer it if all of the items' descriptions were displayed on the screen, with the clicked-upon item at the top. This way, the "Return To My Inventory" click could be avoided. Also, it would be convenient if the "Take X item and then..." link would both take the item and execute the described action. As it is now, the user must click on the item's image to take it, and then click on the link to execute the action. The games might seem smoother if this sequence were streamlined into one click, instead. The Back button is also a welcome improvement. In the current interface, I found myself using my browser's Back button quite often, when playing the Wal*Mart and Finals Week games. For games in which death or failure is a common ending, the Back function is essential. However, I found its placement in the upper right hand corner of the New game interface screen to be somewhat limiting. Because the options are situated far from the choices presented in the game, it is a bit difficult to naturally flip back and forth between the current and previous list of choices within the game. For this reason, I found myself using my browser's Right Click->Back option much more often than the on-screen Back button. I would prefer for the game options to be in a more central location, perhaps similar to how they are arranged in the current interface, or even along the center of the top bar, instead of the right of it. While playing, I found a few small functionality bugs, but did not encounter any asp.net error screens. I hope my comments help with your Alpha release. If you'd like clarification on any of these points, please request an Answer Clarification. I'd be happy to help you. Your question isn't finished until you're satisfied with my answer, so please don't hesitate to ask! Thanks again for the fun and interesting question! Play Strategy: I played the Wal*Mart game to its completion (the "Cool Ending"), under the current interface, and then played about ten minutes of it under the new interface, for comparison. It's a shame the "Uberending" for this game is broken, because I was rather proud to have found it! Next, I played the Finals Week game to its completion, using the new interface only, to get a better idea of how the inventory works when proceeding through an entire game. Finally, I sampled The Black Hand, using both interfaces.