Tam said:

OK I've joined. What now?

If you have added your iPad as a device, I will add it to my provisioning profile with Apple and re-compile the App. You will receive an email fom Testflight once I upload it. At that point, Testflight will install it on your iPad.

I will try to get it uploaded today. I just need to turn my Mac on and get it done. It takes bout half an hour for me to complete that process.

I've uploaded the latest version with two new players. Christopher and Helmut. I don't know if that's you or not. If not, you need to add your iPad to Testflight. If it is you, enjoy! I hope to see you in The Rookery soon.

I gotta be honest. I love the concept of this app, but after testing it I think it needs a major usability overhaul in order to have any chance of gaining widespread acceptance. It takes too many gestures to do simple actions like moving a card from your hand into play or adding tokens to a card in play, which slows down an already inherently slow game. Every action in the game needs to be drag and drop, not press and hold menu, otherwise people will get frustrated.

As a bit of background I am a QA and Usability Manager for a biometric authentication product development company, so I feel I can speak with some knowledgeability about this topic. People in general would rather have a sh*tty app that's easy to use, than a great app whose controls are a cluster **** (not saying that yours are that bad though).

Drag and drop from hand to table would be nice, yes. But then I still have to display a menu so you have the option to put the card into play Face Up or Face Down. Allowing drag-and-drop within the Hand window also causes other problems with actually scrolling the Hand window to see all the cards in it. It would have to be a long-press drag-and-drop to get the cards out, which takes longer than a double-tap. Any specific recommendations you have about this?

As for adding power, it's one button to add the power to the table and a single drag and drop of the power icon onto the card. Seems easy enough. Do you envision a double-tap with a menu option to add the power to the card instead? I could reverse the double-tap to show the menu for cards in play instead of kneeling it, too, but then how to kneel it? An option on the menu? Again, any specific recommendations?

Drag and "throw" to the various images on the screen is easy enough, eh? Double-tap gold icons to "spend" them is easy enough, too, eh?

I downloaded it and will try it out over the next few days. Thanks!

Thank you for asking

1. 1 finger to drag from hand and place face up, 2 fingers to drag from hand and place face down.

2. Have left and right arrow buttons on either side of the hand frame that scroll the hand left and right, or just a scroll bar under the hand to drag the view.

3. Have gold and power 'pools' represented by their corresponding icons somewhere on the screen, dragging from these pools to any card puts a power on said card, same with gold. Removing would be dragging either (power or gold) from the card back to the pool icon (or preferrably just out into open space).

4. There shouldnt be multiple copies of a single icon when there is more than one present. Even overlapping this is too obstructive, it should be the logo itself overlayed with a number representing how many are there.

5. There should be some sort of lobby rather than loading right to the game table. Its confusing that you are at a table and can load a deck, but still need to connect to a server and find a game. See octgn for what i mean.

6. I would focus on making deck building much quicker. As of now it is hard to find cards unless you know what you are looking for, and time consuming to actually build a deck. If there was an easier and faster way to put decks together it would make testing much much easier. I dont have 45 mins to tap my way through the UI to build a deck before i can even begin to test.

These are just a few thoghths off the top of my head but if you want a general rule to go by think this way. If you hand your app to a person who knows how to play thrones, they should be able to pick it up and intuitively be able to use it right away without much instruction. If they can't, then you have a problem.

A couple other thoughts i had is:

7) You need either a dedicated server that auto connects upon opening the app, or a way to see who else has a private game open and include their ip and p/w of how to join it. It is hard enough to meet other people that play thrones, let alone ones who own an ipad, and who happen to have the same play schedule that i do.

8) Forget the 'tap to see a big version of the card' feature and just implement pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in. By round three there will always be more cards on the table than can fit well on an ipad screen, swiping and pinching to zoom and scroll around the table is a natural motion that all people will expect to be able to do, and will be frustrated if they cant. The tap to zoom is nice, but feels more like a work around than a solution.

Please do not take my criticism as evidence that I think your app is ****. You have stated clearly that it is beta so no one expected perfection, and this is exactly where i expect a beta product to be. You have a kickass core product that i think has potential to grow thrones (and any other lcg) beyond what we can all currently imagine. It just needs a bit more TLC. Keep up the great work I drool in anticipation of seeing what this becomes.

___

Thanks for the feedback. I have comments.

1. Good ideas. I'll play around with that.

2. I personally don't like apps with arrow buttons like that, but it's easy enough to try it to see how it feels. I like scrolling that hand window.

3. I like this idea, too, if there aren't too many icons already on the tabletop. We do need to allow gold icons to remain on the table, though, and not on cards. Also, based on what I had to do to get power to stack properly on cards, I won't be adding the ability to remove them with a drag and drop. That falls within the drag and drop code for the entire card object itself, which has to remain as it is. It'll be difficult and cumbersome for the user for me to try to determine if you're dragging the power icon or the card itself. Add pinch and zoom as you said will make that even more complicated. More about that below.

4. I personally don't like icons with numbers on them, either. Takes away fom the feel I'm trying to produce that this is a real tabletop. I'll think about this.

6. There is a search option button in the deck builder. Right now it's easy to search for words in any card name, but the other two searches will be incomplete since I don't have all that data in the database yet. Very soon I will, thanks to Arcanjl for providing a full spreadsheet. Many more search options will be available soon.

7. There will be a dedicated server at some point. I'm not ready to pay for that, though. Once I am, it will be built-in.

8. Pinch and zoom was in the alpha version and it really sucked. There is a lot of room right now to fit a lot of cards on the screen, especially with the ability to simply tap the hand icon or other icons to hide and display those various piles. I may play around with pinch and zoom again, but I'll have to implement rules about the smallest size to prevent users from pinching them so small they can no longer zoom them back out. And a button to make them all the same size again, and dealing with then pushing the zoom sizes to the opponent's side through the server. I played around with this a lot already and it was really messy even though I liked some of it.

It certainly is built right now for people who already know how to play. Building some kind of tutorial will be a project all its own.

I don't know anyone who builds decks in only 45 minutes. I was thinking about a game-play option that generates a completely random deck for both players, with a rule set that says players have no out-of-house gold cost penalties. "Quick game" mode.

Kep the comments coming, and thanks. I'll play around with these recommendations to see how they feel.

Awesome. I have one more thought to add in general. Try not to fall into the mode of thinking where 'im not gunna do it like that cuz its too tough to code'. make a decision based solely on what is best for your product, then figure out how to implement it, rather than the other way around. The end result will be a much better product and your userbase will appreciate it.

It's never about too tough to code. Never. Those power counters were extremely challenging. I won't go into the details, but I'm merging images rather than moving multiple images in a single drag.

And, unfortunately, finding the perfect user experience is like picking a religion. Many stinky opinions and no real proof to support them, just user preference.

I've never used an app I've considered had the perfect user interface. Gads, we have people whose full-time job is trying to figure out what that is.