The Princess Rescuing Application (Mixing Games and Applications)

[ewemoa]

From a few years back, but just read through Mixing Games and Applications -- slides from:

talk [was] on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications.

Took about half an hour to go through but was quite interesting.

I wonder if anyone who has seen this material has been inspired to apply some of the content to an existing app...


via: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/10/princess-rescuing-application-slides.html

[kwacky1]

Thanks for sharing. It's definitely got me thinking about how I can make progressively advancing interfaces for my programs.

[ewemoa]

Glad to hear it!

I went through it a second time with an ex-developer -- we were both inspired by the possibilities 

[TaoPhoenix]

There's a big User Interface discussion swirling around in there. I assumed we had the interfaces we do because "trope makers" get influence and then that influence travels to the ecosystems. There's no reason we can't have more "fun" in the interfaces, unless someone thinks it will hurt sales by looking "not professional".

I took a small step towards this "Fun" theme in my NANY app from a couple of years ago. It dates from just before the time when I resigned myself to "all apps are boring" per this article. When I commissioned it, I did spend a few moments wanting to add a little zest, and so added in the UI skins. When I was just starting out working, I thought it would be fun if there were some interfaces that looked like some of the alien tech from Star Trek!

More recent forays into the learning curve thing are when I asked Vladimir to build in the modular "simple skin" for Real World Paint. It had only the ten-ish features I use, and all the other stuff became tucked behind a toggle in case I actually needed it.