Comic Conventions

Raph points us to this very interesting Scott McCloud-esque post over on Blambot, the site run by Nate Piekos who does comic lettering and font creation for hire.

It's an interesting read, but also interesting to think about the conventions discussed here and how second-nature they are to most people. As Raph mentions, when using speech bubbles for in-game chat in SWG, they ended up using many of the same conventions. 

It's probably a good idea in general for any game, or for any product for that matter, to think about assumed conventions relevant to their product's interface. There are times that going against convention may be the right thing to do, but you should be aware you are doing it.

Review: Hello Kitty MP3 Player!

One of the little fringe benefits of blogging is that people occasionally send stuff in the mail in the hopes that you'll like it and write about it. I figure it's simple enough to do so, though I'll be honest in writing it up and if it sucks then so be it.

There's a pile of recent arrivals waiting for writing up, including a Hello Kitty themed MP3 player, a Star Wars themed digital camera for kids, and three different books. I'll get to the first of those here:

Sanrio Hello Kitty MP3 Player

This is basically a generic 1Gb flash-based MP3 player. The "Hello Kitty" theme is entirely in the 3 snap-on face plates and the pink earbuds. It comes with some software to manage your music collection, etc, but it's not necesary that you use it, as plugging the device into the USB port makes it appear like a USB flash drive. 

The good:

• It's cheap ($40 list (street probably $30-35?))
• Functioning as a flash drive doesn't mean you have to use proprietary SW like iPod or Zune
• Backlit display

The bad:

• Faceplates add bulk (see pics in this review comparing to the thickness of an ipod)
• included earbuds are *awful* quality
• The user interface is horrendous. 

The last point above is the real issue. To be fair, this is the same as you get with almost ALL generic mp3 players. The menu system to navigate folders, settings, etc is just cumbersome. I owned several pre-iPod and they all had a different flavor of this issue. The question is whether you want to deal with that to save a few dollars (over something like a nano or mini-zune). If so, then a generic player is fine, and if you want one with a Hello Kitty theme, then look here.

UI: The next frontier in game innovation?

Holy Hell! How did I miss Crayon Physics until now?!



This looks just awesome. As a fan of The Incredible Machine, Bridge Builder, and other physics puzzle type games, I can't wait to play it. Love the aesthetic too.

More importantly though, I wonder whether games like Crayon Physics, Little Big Planet, and applications like SketchUp are pointers to a whole new area of innovation for games: UI.

The challenge with any games aiming to support "user generated content", or for that matter, just letting people manipulate the world in less constrained ways - is that controlling stuff, let alone creating stuff, especially in 3D, is HARD.

So how do you make it easy? These apps are pointing the way. I think a great opportunity and challenge in front of developers today is in letting users accomplish unlimited, complicated, beautiful things, and doing so quickly and easily. Easier said than done!