Angled Whiteboards

Balls… balls… balls… Sam & Max Episode 5!

New games:

• Fast Lanes Bowling
• Rocket Bowl
• Virtual Pool 3
• Sam & Max Episode 5: Reality 2.0

New on GameTap TV:

• GameTap News: Burnout
• Sealab 2021: Tourist Season

Dinah and I are IN THE THICK of it over here, so we don’t have time to do up a full blow-by-blow 1.8 design path review. But we do have a couple of whiteboard photos.

Some whiteboard activity was wiped clean before it could be photographed — the Gotta-Getta-Game concepts that got erased were superfun (at one point, you’d have been hard pressed to say one particular drawing wasn’t a bus). But a lot of things in 1.8 ended up going pretty cleanly from whiteboard to implementation anyway.

The naked, somewhat informative download process in 1.7:

The revised, more informative download process in 1.8:

Some of the minor points we worked through on this:

• How can we use SIMPLE MATH to show more info about a download in progress?
• “Get Game” vs. “Download Game”
• “Abort” vs. “Stop” vs. “Pause”
• “Continue in Background” vs. “Download in Background”
• What color is the background download-dot juice now that we don’t just have a full yellow dot?

My Playlists initial sketch:

Minor design points (and other stuff you might notice):

• “Favorites” vs. “My Games” vs. “My Playlists”
• The revised web/pdf all-purpose icon
• A couple of ideas for iconifying this very blog
• Blurry and cropped out bits (like I said: IN THE THICK)
  

You can’t beat this new and simple contraption.

[Chocolate extra]

I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of GameTap running on Ben’s laptop in last night’s Lost.  Maybe a screencap’ll show up here.

Being a Mac guy, I’ve been a fan of Bungie since the original Marathon series (Frog blast the vent core!). And while I gave Oni a shot, and am a huge Halo fan, I never tried the Myth series. NOW’S MY CHANCE.

Zork Zero also gets added this week. I played a lot of Infocom games as a kid and played almost all of the Steve Meretzky games — but I love this nugget from Bonus Material:

Zork Zero is by far the most ambitious and lengthy Zork game — longer than all three games in the original trilogy combined. At least 1,300 moves are required to win; most players find themselves making closer to 10,000.

Put me firmly in the “most players” camp.

Finally, close out the month with The Best of 2000+ in GameTap Picks. 2000+? The 2000s? The Aughts? I’ll be glad when we hit the 20s, so we’ll have a clear and obvious way to refer to our decades again.

New games:

• Myth II: Soulblighter
• Myth III: The Wolf Age
• Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz

New on GameTap TV:

• GameTap News: AIAS
• GameTap Presents: Mastodon
• Quick Hit: Gym Class Heroes
• Sealab 2021: Return to Oblivion
• Sam & Max: Saving the Economy

From the Suggestion Box

“I think it would be cool to have a pulldown window with all your screen names, because I have a 4 year old son with an account and he doesn’t know how to spell very good on the keyboard, and his SN is rather long. We gave him an easy password, but I thought there was a pulldown window for some reason.”

There is indeed an option for a pulldown (or combo) on the login form, but there’s a secret to it. Here’s how to transform the screen name entry field to a combo:

1. When you log in, check the “Remember my screen name and password” checkbox.
2. Then, the next time you come back to log in, voila! A combo!

Oh. Do this at your own risk. As long as that checkbox is checked, anyone using your computer can log in as you.

We check the suggestion box regularly, so if you have a question or a suggestion about how the GameTap UI works, post it there, or send it to us here.