Profiles

[Grey Alien]

OK I'm adding profiles to my latest game, but I have a couple of options and wondered which you thought is best.

a) Prompt on First Play Only: On first load/play you enter your name, then play the game, when you die it auto enters your name into high score. When you next load the game, it doesn't prompt you to choose a profile, it simply says welcome back PlayerName and has a "Click here if this isn't you/Switch Player" type button. The logic behind this being if most games are only played by one person, they don't give a stuff about profiles and just want to play as fast as poss.

b) Prompt on Each Load: You are prompted to create a profile when first loading the game, and then stay "logged on" as the player when playing the game and dying etc so that when you start another game from the title, it doesn't prompt you again. You are only prompted to choose a profile when the game loads. A new player would need to exit the game and reload, unless you add a small "change player" button somewhere.

c) Prompt on Each GameStart: You are prompted to create/select a profile when you click "Play Game". Then once the profile is created/selected, you may be prompted to resume your last game, if one exists. After a game over event, if play game is clicked, you need to select your profile again. The last profile used could be auto-highlighted. No "change player" button is needed for this scenario.

I'm worried that c) involves too many times selecting the profile. However, if you load the game up and only have one go, then exit, it makes no difference from b). The problem with a) is that it actually took me a few games before I realised that there was this whole "change player" thing, it wasn't obvious in a lot of games whereas blatantly having to pick your own name each time is obvious. Having said that a) seems to be pretty prevalent. Then again the Richochet games make you pick each time you click play game, thus use option c)

fire away.... :-) thanks in avance.

[Sharpfish]

Well I am doing A in my WIP game. Seems to make sense and is the cleanest in my opinion.

[RohoMech]

Well Grey, how much time do you have on your hands to test this out, if you have people to try your game out, you could do all three and see how they react to them...but I think A is gonna win mostly because I do think most games aren't going to be shared between people.

Imo, casual games aren't played for huge amounts of time, but they might be started/stopped frequently, so if you go with C or B, each time it loads up they have to pick a profile. Perhaps you could undercut that, if there's only one profile, then just pick it.

The big potential problem I see with A is, Bob's profile is loaded, the game is welcoming Bob, but I'm Timmy...how do I change to me? You're adding a button to change / create a name, and that should take care of that problem.

Hope that helps.

[Grey Alien]

yeah thanks. People seem to like A, I just need to make sure the change profile button is obvious. My last game I did get quite a few people wanting profiles as the game was a really gamily game, with it Christmas theme and all, and husbands and wives with kidsa all wanted to play it with their own profile. But, true, they were probably in the minority. I just want profiles in this next one so it seems that extra bit more professional.

[Kestral]

Create a default profile called "DEFAULT". If no one else is expected to play the game on that machine then they can opt not to bother changing anything and they can click the START button and get playing immediately. Use method B, but always have the START button right there at the top ready to launch with the previously selected profile, be it "DEFAULT" or something they entered.

[Grey Alien]

It's been suggested that I get the default name from whoever is logged on to windows from an environment variable.