The big to do list. Part I: Introduction and UX Design

Hi there, friends and enemies of democracy!

I have written a detailed guide to myself on how to improve Socratic Democracy. For the (10-15) people out there reading this blog , I would like to share my thoughts and hopefully hear yours.

As the guide I wrote is long , I will share my thoughts in little drops so no one feels overwhelmed.

If this makes you want to play or send me a comment on the evolution of the game, feel free to do so.

Introduction. 

This is the ultimate to-do list for the Socratic Democracy Project. Items may be added; hopefully, items will be implemented. In the latter case, items should not be deleted but rather complemented with comments about this achievement, as a mini celebration.

Tickets are labeled with letter and numbers. A to E means high priority (A) to lowest priority.

A. Very High Priority. Implementing this is almost a requirement.

B. High Priority. It would improve the experience noticeably for all players.

C. Medium Priority. It would improve the experience for most players.

D. Low priority. For the use case of the game, this improvement does not add much.

E. Very Low Priority. This improvement could be entirely ignored, but it would be a luxury to implement it.

Numbers 1 to 5 means probable hardship to implement.

1. Very easy. 1-3 hours expected. No investigation or learning required.
2. Easy. 2-6 hours expected. Small code investigation or learning may be required.
3. Not that easy. 6-10 hours, or a full day of work, is expected. This includes making minute changes in many places, investigating, learning new techniques and functions, or making impactful decisions.
4. Hard work. 2-4 days. Making significant changes to lots of places, changing the philosophy behind the code or graphics of an entire section would be examples of this. Making hard decisions that must weigh pros and cons. Activities that require learning the basics of an entire new software, such as audible, would be included here as well. Extremely hard. 
5. 5-? Days. Examples are adding animations and characters everywhere, or adding entire new sections to the game (such as a oligarchic period game mode). 

UX Design 

In the first version of the game, the UX design was not thought out carefully, for several reasons:

• The priority was to make the game work as fast as possible (still took 300 hours).
• There were bigger problems, such as bugs and broken game mechanics.
• Beauty was also considered more important than UX Design. Both can be improved simultaneously, but as a rule I thought about beauty first.
• Given that the target of the first version were students in my class, I knew I could teach/help them use the game, so making an intuitive UX design was not a priority.

The list of things to improve are:

Improve seasonal transition. A1

Lots of people got stuck at the end of each season because they didn’t know that they had to press the “continue button” to move forward. Indeed, most of them did not see the button, which was in the top right corner.

Rebecca and Leopoldo suggested that time should automatically progress when there is nothing left to do. I do not agree entirely, because players should be able to check things out, such as go to the library and check again the introduction or go to the agora to see their current statuses.

To conciliate both objectives, I guess the game should detect when there is nothing left to do that is required to advance and the player is idle (not pressing anything for 4 seconds, e.g.) and then offer to move forward. This could be a pop up in the center of the screen, saying something like “There is no political choice left to do. Move to the next season?” “Yes, go to summer”. “No, I want to explore”. It should easily call the players’ attention.

This is a best-case scenario: an important and easy improvement.

Improve buttons. B3.

I like invisible buttons, but most people do not. I did not figure out completely what is wrong with them, so I would need to first assess that. I suppose that the scroll options and city-places options work fine, but the event buttons could certainly improve.

This could include highlights and better clues that something is a button.

This could take time, because there are many buttons, and they are each implemented individually.

Sound Effects. B3 or B4.

The idea for this ticket would be to add sound effects to pretty much everything. A few obvious events that need SFX:

• Pressing buttons,
• Entering scenes, such as the agora.
• Negative reactions from voters when you lose an election or policy vote.
• Sounds related to events popping up (B3 if it is always the same sound; B4 if the sound varies).
• Sounds to mark the change of season.

I have been finding (bad) sound effects fun and easy to make. Still, it could be lots of trouble adding sounds to everything.

Improve Menus, including start menu. C2.

The beginning of the game is an animation. It may look nice but is not user-friendly. For instance, there is no opportunity to change language, and the player feels pressure to just press a button.

Add saving options. C4.

As the game is pretty short (5-10 minutes), creating a saving system was not a high priority at first, and still is not at the top of my list. However, there are two advantages to having a saving system: first and foremost, I could save crucial information that later help detect bugs. Second, players could feel safer to save and come back later.

A saving system will require extensive re-programing, particularly to fix small changes in several places, such as making different nodes visible or not.