REALbasic vs. Revolution

Scott Rossi scott at tactilemedia.com
Thu Oct 10 18:18:01 EDT 2002


Recently, "Ro Nagey"  wrote:

> Cool game...but like the docs say - meaningless if you don't know the
> rules...which are located where?

There were no rules, only mysteries to solve.  :-)

The UI was intentionally exploratory -- no instructions.  Players were
supposed to interact with the software and figure out what to do as they
went along.  You can see below for a more detailed response, but to keep on
topic, the player, registration and progress/dialog windows are all custom
shapes without standard UI widgets.  We tried a slightly unusual approach of
making the play button on the player perform three different actions
depending on the context.  I think this was successful but we'd have to poll
the users to really see for sure...

At any rate, this example isn't that radical in terms of alternative UI
layout and functionality, but it's a small step. Another example of
something built with MC can be seen here:

http://www.avault.com/hardware/getreview.asp?review=logisr30&page=3

A fun little feedback element was the meter at the top of the window.  On
the opening (home) screen, the meter simulated the appearance of measuring
the audio level of the opening music.  In all subsequent screens (without
sound), the meter digits simply chased back and forth to indicate the
"operational" status of the program.  Again, while the overall functionality
wasn't radically different, it's worthwhile to note that developers can
build some fairly alternative UIs in Rev/MC.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
-----
E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com



GAME DETAILS

Solving the Plexata puzzles required creative thinking on the part of the
players.  The challenge wasn't just solving each puzzle, but figuring out
*how* to interact with each puzzle's UI.  For example, the solution of the
first puzzle requires finding all the triangle shapes that can be formed out
of the buttons.  This led players to some obscured images of chromosomes.
Players then had to figure out that they needed to convert each letter of
the word "CHROMOSOME" into a base 4 number and enter this code into the
player digits to advance to the next level.  In level 2, the solution was an
image of an exploding sphere with a gamma symbol centered within the sphere:
the solution was "GAMMARAYBURST", which again had to be converted into base
4 numbers and entered into the player.  All the puzzles in the Plexata demo
are playable and solvable, they just don't link to each other, nor do they
register your progress on the server.




More information about the use-livecode mailing list