Changing the wallpaper

Posted by Peter Rootham-Smith.
First posted on 15 March 2003. Last updated on 25 September 2008.
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Commercial websites and internet portals put a lot of effort into letting users customize their view of the website. This benefits the users by letting them see what they are interested in. It also benefits the websites by increasing traffic to their portals. Given the user interface for a computer adventure game is much more important than the user interface for a website, just how much are…

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Very Good

I have a comment about the mouse control. I believe some limited implementation could be hacked up in a week by one developer or so. The considerations for keyboard may have been that it translates directly to the game console input controllers, and this was quite a thing, considering the growing popularity of Sony Playstation back than.

A commercially important consideration is not so much a feature development cost, but rather an amount of testing and tweaking the game must take in this event. Sometimes you cannot click on places, on which you can walk round using the keyboard, and sometimes you can click on spots, which are not marked "walkable", i.e you usually cannot walk around on spots, which are marked as triggering the action to exit the room, which is not the same as walking throught this spot. This means inserting more event sensors and additional testing may be requiered.

On the one hand, keyboard control causes stress, mouse and especially graphic tablet are so much nicer, so it is a great pity that this control is being dropped. On the other, you can actually take a programmable console-like gamepad, lean back and steer a keyboard-controlled game using it, and this actually feels very relaxing from my experience.

As to boring puzzles... Yes, this is a great problem. I only ever play for half an hour at once, so if there is any part that cannot be passed in that time and there is no possibility to save and pick up, then the game usually stays unfinished forever.

Germany By Ilya Minkov • On 27 January 2007 • From München, Germany