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toolness / mobile-microgame-maker

Attempt at building a mobile microgame maker for Minicade.
http://mmm.minica.de
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Create issues for feedback from Chloe's game jam on Dec. 6 #13

Open toolness opened 9 years ago

toolness commented 9 years ago

@chloeatplay did playtesting for Minicade/MMM at the movable game jam on December 6!

Here are her findings, which we should turn into issues--some of which should actually be filed in minicade:

I ran a 1hr mini game jam starting with a physical mini game, then brainstorming ridiculous mini games using 3 prompts. Dancing bear, the outcome of a broken telephone game (fluffy) and an idea from the kids which was make a game for someone in your family.

Then we played the sample Minicade and everyone started remixing their own games. Overall I think despite the bugs the UX difficulties and the limitations of the tool right now in terms of types of games you can make it was a great session, kids had fun and I gathered good feedback.

Here is my playtesting feedback:

  1. There is a bug on blockly where when you try to click on the drop down instead it drags the component out of that puzzle. This makes it annoying to even change the smallest parameters. [bug]
  2. The (x) on upper right in blockly occasionally doesn't work on chrome android tablet [bug]
  3. Changing sprites by clicking on the spritesheet button is actually something users did more than adding a new sprite. We should make it more visible as an option in the UX. [ux/ui]
  4. Publish to web always fails the first time on chrome android and occasionally on Firefox and chrome browsers. Reloading and trying again fixes it. Filed as #14.
  5. The sidebar in blockly admiteddly takes much space. If there is anyway to make it smaller that would help users especially as they add more sprites in their game and therefore need the most space to create code blocks [UX]
  6. From all the options on blockly was the one most kids used. They got it and wished there was more than tapping games. On that note nobody used math. We either have to provide games that use those or hide/remove for now.
  7. Sounds were wildly successful and along with the spirites saved the day in making some variation in the games. Kids loved the squeeze, evil sounds- the mighty princess and creatures. [asset design]
  8. Kids asked for more mechanics like ability to fight between sprites (collision detection) and a trivia game or the ability to adding words / sentences for winning/ loosing conditions
  9. Kids were hooked with playing even the not so functional games (check them on mmm playlist) Totally worth it having them on mobile.
  10. Copy/paste of the published URL was a bit problematic since edit Minicade doesn't work on mobile - I don't have a good solution on how to make that flow work right now but I think we should solve it.
toolness commented 9 years ago
  1. Kids asked for more mechanics like ability to fight between sprites (collision detection) and a trivia game or the ability to adding words / sentences for winning/ loosing conditions

I actually added words in 5cc83a674161554d51409cf7c3d152ccc2d45186! (Which was done after the game jam event, sadly.) It's super simple right now, games just have a concept of "main text" which is always at a fixed font/size and centered in the middle of the screen. It can only be set via a blockly block called "set main text to" which takes text as an input value, but it allows for lots of interesting possibilities. That said, trivia games won't really be possible with it, I don't think.

Here is a super simple example of it: http://games.minica.de/emzwelvf

And this is the game's blockly source:

screen shot 2014-12-09 at 8 33 23 am

(Note also that this game also uses math, yay!)