First thing I did was merging Alcaraz’ changes on the environment; we continue making it smaller and more interesting.
Next up I worked hard on accessibility and onboarding; Magical Mirai probably gets hundreds of submissions… there’s a very little margin of patience for the jurors to understand and get to the best part of each entry, so this is an important factor of success.
The idea is to make the interface as straightforward as possible and, in cases where we have to, explain (hopefully in as little places as possible, the UI should be self-explanatory). I have been working on this already the last couple of weeks as the experience gets streamlines, but it’s a constant effort. Also, we now gotta fight in two fronts: the mobile and desktop experience, which are different worlds to cater (the woes of multiplatform I’ve already suffered through with Kramora’s Shadow).
For the main interaction in mobile, I am presenting as little options as possible and they should all be visible at a glance. I added an explicit button to take a picture, instead of tapping anywhere in the screen, as it’s a very well-known affordance and prevents conflict with the joysticks dragging as well. I also adjusted the position of the photo preview to prevent clashing with it.
But ultimately, we had to add some textual instructions; these are also device specific: for desktop we have a lot of screen real state so I put them on a persistent “tips” section that is always visible to the player; this is also helpful because in desktop it’s harder to provide a focused view of all possible actions without cluttering the screen, and there are also some keyboard shortcuts.
For mobile, the equivalent are full screen pop ups but I only use them in the “travelbook” screen since that’s the one that requires a bit of a longer explanation… the main interaction should hopefully be self explanatory, as the player should discover and get comfortable with the controls just by taping around. In order for this to work, however, I added a confirmation prompt for the “photo review” button, which also avoid accidental session ends.
In any case, both device types share a quite long instruction panel which I located as part of the loading screen to have a greater change of players reading it. It gives an overall idea of what the game is about which might seem obvious but probably isn’t when you are checking a lot of entries.
Also as you could see, I added a localization system, and translated all the content from English to Japanese. It’s also “Japanese First”, as we are catering to the Japanese players as the main audience.
I also continued working on polishing the mobile experience with proper spacing and layout.
Another big decision was to remove the song selection feature; we are going to stick with a single song since the poses made by Miku are going to be specific for it, so we are going to up its value. Hopefully we will be able to create some more poses for it to increase variety!
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 