Version 0.1
Prose is too wordy.
Poor outline.
Incomplete.
Too many gut feelings, not enough referenced facts.
In general a task oriented approach will be taken to interface design. The user has a series of tasks that must be performed, the design should be based along the thought process as the user performs these tasks. Note also the section on general usability which provides a concise description of general guidelines that do not fit into the task oriented model.
This implementation was written for Apple's Macintosh computers in 19??. It was originally designed when most Macs had black and white screen 512x384 pixels. Its use of colour is exceptional. Since it was designed for black and white screens the only use of colour has been added to identify players territories (it originally used textures, these were hard to distinguish). This minimalist use of colour has lead to a very readable interface. The only exception to this is the water on the map. This uses the original black and white background and has a water texture, this adds unwanted clutter to the screen.
<INCLUDE FIG 1 HERE>
The control system consists of a map and two status bars. On the left there is a small panel that shows which player is currently playing and the order in which the players get there turn. Along the bottom there is a panel to show how many armies the player has to place on the map before continuing with his turn. This bar is a means of visualising the state of the game. Since some armies can be placed without restriction onto the board and others have tight restrictions we encounter a slight flaw in this design. The type of each army can not be deduced from looking at the screen.
This game is not networkable although multi-player is possible around one machine. The robot players come in three forms aggressive, random and neutral. All three are very predictable and pose no challenge to human players. See later sections for comments on robot strategy.
This program was originally written for 16-bit Windows, it has a slight interface face lift when Windows 95 was released. I initially concluded this game was a clone of Risk for Mac that took the limited number of bad features in Risk for Mac, expanded upon them and then sold the game rather than giving it away.
I was on the whole correct. This game's interface is very similar to Risk for Mac, in some cases the actual icons used are identical and there has been no significant redesign of any part of the interface. Where the interface has been expanded it seems to be to add bad features.
For example, to place several armies into one country it is natural for the user to repeatedly click on that country. RiskIt however interprets a double click on a country as a status request. This drastically slows down the use of the interface as one has to click slower than a double click.
I never found this game to be as attractive as Risk for Mac, the countries have very jagged and the colour and texture of the sea can be distracting. It should be observed that where Risk for Mac used a bitmap to draw the map, Risk for Windows uses a vector drawing. This means the game window can be drawn at any size, if it were not so ugly this would be a desirable feature.
As with Risk for Mac the robots come in three varieties with the same icons in the same dialog box. However I have been unable to assess them as only the random robot in enabled in the unregistered shareware version.
Risk for PC was released as fully commercial software in 1998. It has all the technological features you would expect in a modern game. The graphics are beautiful the sound effects rich and the game unplayable. Sadly the game is not as fun to play as its cheaper cousins.
My primary problem with this game is that the main window is not easy to use. Due to some unwritten requirement the surface of the world is textured, this is unnessesary clutter. In addition in order to fit the huge graphic detail onto the screen so the screen has been made to scroll. Human short term memory struggles to remember the whole map as discussed in ? Preece(1994) ?.
I can not (yet) get the bugger to work!
Having seen how good the Risk for Mac user interface is I have taken that as a base design. I will try to address my criticisms of its interface and since it has not network support will have to add this feature.
The map must be smaller than the screen.
All applications tend to have File, Edit menus these days. It is good practice (WHERE, HOW) to give the user familiar features. However there are no files to be handled, therefore the File menu would be misnamed. Instead it will be called the Game menu and control all game starting/ending features.
The Edit menu does have meaning. Cut, Copy and Paste should be possible in the chat section. Undo would be nice in some parts of the game interface.
In addition to the above there will be an options menu. This menu will permit the user to choose time saving features for the in game interface and configure the chat system as the user would like.
Below are listed the 4 tasks a user must perform to play Risk.
Chatting
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Below is listed how to start a server, in task, action pairs.
Wait for other players to join the game, then start.