Initial thoughts re: intro and first level of peanutty

[Jimmy Li]

Sent this email to Jared originally, and thought it might be of interest to the list:

---

Hey Jared,

I spent a bit of time this afternoon playing on Peanutty and really enjoyed it! I'd definitely like to understand it better/contribute to it in some way. Here are some initial observations:

*You might want to change the color scheme on the left nav bar, as it's a little unclear unclear what's on and what's off

In the simple bucket level...

*Instead of saying "try again (after firing)", you might want it to say "reload" or something like that. I say this because I thought that when I hit "try again," it'd re-fire the cannon. Instead, it just loaded the ball.

*It's not initially clear what the "load level" button does versus the "reset level" one.

*Along those lines, the level would sometimes reset when I didn't expect them to. Basically, it wasn't very clear how I should (1) make changes in the code, (2) run the code with those changes, and (3) make sure not to accidentally reset the level and lose my changes. Any way you might make this clearer?

*Also, sometimes my cursor would inadvertently leave the javascript console and shift to the browser. When this happens, keystrokes mean different things. For instance, enter means "refresh the browser page," not "move to the next line in the code" (as I expected). So pressing enter in this case makes the user lose all of her work. Is there something you could do to make it obvious when you're no longer in the javascript console?

*Are you thinking about putting in a debugger (i.e. something that suggests to you why your code isn't running)? That might be really useful.

General thoughts:

I really like the feeling of control this game provides. So few games give you SO much flexibility. I think this total freedom allows for peanutty to be very addictive/challenging for both players and game creators (who should probably be considered players themselves). Talk about choosing among multiple paths! There are so much potential solutions to each game! The feeling of "oh wait, I can do THIS too! was pretty awesome."

[Jared Cosulich]

Jimmy,

I think all of these issues are dead-on. I'll start poking at them,
but if you have any thoughts on how to better solve them that would be
helpful.

I've started adding in issues to GitHub:

https://github.com/jaredcosulich/Peanutty/issues

If any of you want to be able to add issues let me know and I'll
invite you to the project.

Jared

On Jan 29, 9:16 pm, Jimmy Li <j...@pivotallabs.com> wrote:
> Sent this email to Jared originally, and thought it might be of interest to
> the list:
>
> ---
> Hey Jared,
>
> I spent a bit of time this afternoon playing on Peanutty and really enjoyed
> it! I'd definitely like to understand it better/contribute to it in some
> way. Here are some initial observations:
>
> *You might want to change the color scheme on the left nav bar, as it's a
> little unclear unclear what's on and what's off
>

> *In the simple bucket level...*

[Jared Cosulich]

Also here is some feedback from Bleicke:

Hey Jared,

I checked it out yesterday in the evening. I have to say I got bored
with the cannon after like 10 seconds and started messing up the code
to the right side ;-) So it's definitely working for me.

One thing that was confusing, to me, was the fact that you don't see
the code for setting up the level. I was going to cheat and initialize
the ball inside of the bucket, but I couldn't find the coordinates for
any of the objects on the right. What exactly is shown on the right?
I also didn't manage to finish the "free form" building tool. Usually
it's ESC or double-click, but neither of those worked.

Will play around some more.

Best,
Bleicke

On Jan 30, 10:23 am, Jared Cosulich <ja...@irrationaldesign.com>
wrote:

[Jared Cosulich]

I've made a bunch of changes to the site based on this feedback.

Would be curious to hear thoughts on the changes. If you don't see
obvious changes then you might have to ctrl+refresh the page to clear
the browser cache.

I'm going to work on a debugger or at least a message noting code
errors.

Jared


On Jan 29, 9:16 pm, Jimmy Li <j...@pivotallabs.com> wrote:

> Sent this email to Jared originally, and thought it might be of interest to
> the list:
>
> ---
> Hey Jared,
>
> I spent a bit of time this afternoon playing on Peanutty and really enjoyed
> it! I'd definitely like to understand it better/contribute to it in some
> way. Here are some initial observations:
>
> *You might want to change the color scheme on the left nav bar, as it's a
> little unclear unclear what's on and what's off
>

> *In the simple bucket level...*
>

[Jimmy Li]

Love the changes, Jared. Especially the "you have some old code, would you like to reload it?" one.

[Jimmy Li]

A related suggestion: can you put in a "you are about to leave Peanutty. Are you sure you want to exit?" type message when the user tries to leave the window? (Such a message would have saved me from accidentally leaving many times).

[Jared Cosulich]

I had such a warning in there at first, but it annoyed me because you
would come to the site, drop a few balls on letters and then leave and
it would ask you "are you sure you want to leave?", which felt a
little aggressive considering I was just playing around. The problem
is that it's hard to tell the difference between someone who is just
playing around and someone who is actively changing the code.

Maybe if we can figure out how to tell if someone is actively changing
the code then such a solution would work better. I'll give it some
thought.