Quitting in TRAUMA

No, I’m not quitting TRAUMA. On the contrary, I just added another feature I kept postponing for way too long. It is now possible to quit a level before completing it. You know, in case you get stuck for example. It was another tricky interface design problem, too. I’m still not 100% sure about my solution.

As you may already know, the entire in-game interface in TRAUMA works with mouse gestures. There is no GUI to speak of, no buttons or menus. The main disadvantage of mouse gestures is that the functions they can trigger are invisible to users. This means that users don’t know how to trigger a function unless the program teaches the gesture somehow. And even then, gestures are easily forgotten unless they users have plenty of opportunities to practice them.

This is OK if the gestures are tied in to puzzles. But the problem is that some functions aren’t meant to be puzzles. Quitting a level is certainly one of such functions. Players will probably want to use it when they get stuck. It should be very easy to execute this function at all times, even when a player doesn’t really understand the gesture interface yet.

This basically disqualifies using a gesture to quit the level. It would be difficult to teach the gesture. Users may not be able to remember and/or trigger it when they need to. On the other extreme, users might trigger it by accident, which would be equally catastrophic.

So I decided to go with a traditional button to quit a level in TRAUMA. Fortunately, I already had a piece of GUI in place that could be combined with this function. When players find certain collectibles in the game, an row of icons slides in from the top of the screen and informs them on their progress. I decided to add a quit button in the upper right corner of that row. I also added a function that would made the row slide in whenever the mouse cursor moves to the top of the screen. Finally I added a special level quit mouse gesture after all and made the quit button look like the mouse gesture.

The row if icons slides in from the top when the you move the mouse to the top of the screen.

This solves a lot of problems. It allows players to check on the progress of the collectibles at all times, which wasn’t possible earlier. It adds the quit button but it’s not constantly in view so it can’t be clicked by accident and doesn’t distract from the visuals. Because the row of icons slides in automatically when players find collectibles, the chance that they miss the button is very slim. The quit button is in the upper-right corner anyway – a popular interface convention. Finally, because the button looks like the quit gesture, it will teach to players the quit gesture and they may chose to use it instead. The gesture looks like a X which should be easy to remember and associate with quitting.

But wait, wasn’t I also concerned that players might trigger the quit gesture by accident? Well, that’s why the quit gesture is special. Until now, all gestures in the game had to be done with one stroke. You would keep the mouse button pressed until the gesture was done. The quit gesture has to be done with two strokes. Players need to draw the first diagonal line, release the mouse button and then quickly draw the second diagonal line. The chance for triggering the gesture accidentally is minimal.

As I’ve said, I’m still not 100% sure about this solution. The thing that concerns me the most is that the collectibles are now a little bit over-exposed. It’s supposed to be sub-quest. Players might now confuse it with the main game objective. I’m also not perfectly happy about mixing icons with buttons and not differentiating visually what is click-able and what is not. Of course there are mouse-over effects but those aren’t obvious on first sight. But I was playing with the idea of making the other icons click-able as well. It could be an alternative way of traveling trough the levels.

In any case, that function is certainly something I will need to playtest thoroughly. Until then, you can help me out by telling me what you think?