Saturday, April 19, 2014

Help Me To Solve Some KBounce's Design Issues

Hello everybody.

Me and last year's Season of KDE student Anuj Pahuja implemented a save and load feature as well as keyboard support for KBounce. However, before finally merging the changes into the master branch I'd like to hear your opinion regarding some design questions. Here they go:

1. The player is allowed to load a saved game only once. i.e. as soon as the game is loaded the save file is deleted. I made this to avoid cheating from the player's side. Without deleting the file, a player could replay the same saved game countless times, managing to always go to the highscores list.

I'm unsure about this. Is it desirable for a player to have this ability? What's your general experience on the subject?

2. By default, the keys used to move the cursor are W, A, S, D; L for rotation and Space to simulate a mouse click. What do you think about this setup? Are the arrow keys preferred over W, A, S and D? Independent on the default settings the shortcuts may be changed by the player.

3. The following screenshots show the new dialogs I've had to include. #1 looks terrible though I can't think on good alternatives to improve it for now. Your opinions are very welcome.

Save Game Dialog
Load Game Dialog
Trying to Load a Game When Tere's None Saved

4. Is Ctrl+O a good shortcut for "Load Last Saved Game"? What would be a better alternative?

The code is available at the keyboard-integration branch on kbounce's repository. Give it a try and feel free to share your thoughts on the comments bellow.