Some retooling.

So yeah, I think this makes things a lot better as far as "casual game" archetyp goes. Its casual because the people who play it are casual, not because the game is wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

I forget that sometimes I think. That the people who play the games are casual, and not the game itself. Your game can be serious, you just have to remember your audience isnt.

So when I made these enormous storylines for each game's original treatment I wanted to include them for other people to read. I naturally assumed the How To Play would be where those went.

That was possibly the worst place to put them. People say a novel worth of text when they clicked How To Play and just closed the window without looking.

I moved the gist of it in to "big picture" format so that even a cursory glance at the page embeds in your mind what you need to do, and how to do it.

Here is what our game selection screen for Explodinator looked like before (and technicall still looks like this now):



Not much to tell you what to do here, and though the story might be fun to read, you probably wont read it and will just start the game then become annoyed because you dont know how to play.




New screen is much more obvious, and of course this is the rough draft. The graphic design guy will probably want to spend a few hours with this making it look good, etc. But the gist of the game mechanic is here, its only two lines long, and its BIG AND WHITE on a black background, so its hard to miss.

I think this is much better as far as interface goes. If you want the story, well, sorry there just isnt a place to put it. I would love to work out something, maybe a section on the website where I can post all that fluffy flavor text, but for now it really does just obstruct your path to our entire reason for existance: The Games!

I could post some before / after shots of what we did to our chat system too after much Alpha tester input, but alas I have no screen shots of the old client and the new one is already.. well, new.