Closing the loop and thinking about UX

I worked about two more hours on the game. I closed the basic game loop and made some decisions about it. When I started, it was not clear to me exactly how the loop ends. I started working by copying code snippets from the Taxi game to recreate its core game mechanic:

1. People march in from of the taxi or boat and react to the price.
2. In the taxi case, if the taxi fare is lower than the fare the person is willing to pay, they take a set.
3. In the boat case, if the buy price is higher than the price the person is demanding, they sell their goods.

Coming up with a win condition

The loss condition was already clear to me: if you run out of food you lose. Some would say this is a common theme in my games. But the win condition was not clear to me when I started. I had a vague idea that when the player has enough goods they can decide to set sail. To keep things simple, I added a cap for the boat inventory. Once the boat is full, the player sets sail automatically. In the future, I might use this to allow upgrading the boat to hold more inventory. I added a lose scene with just the text “No food”, and a similar temporary win scene with the text “Sailing”.

You can see the game in action in this video (rendering is a bit jumping due to screen recorder):

Product management aspects

As I noted in the previous post, my goal is to get feedback as soon as possible, on a piece of working software. So now I have a working software, can I get feedback? I think that at this point it is very clear that the game UX is horrible. You can’t understand what’s going on. It is hard even for me. So I guess I don’t need to show this to a user or a player in order to know that improving the UX is the next step.