ChemLab: Making My First Game More User-Friendly

Every game needs to be tested, especially at the beginning. So, for the first tester of my game, I chose my wife. She sat down in my chair, looked at me, then glanced at the game, stood up, said, "I have better things to do," and left.

After the successful and productive session with my wife, I decided to send the game to a couple of my friends. They quickly came back with a long list of improvements I could apply. Some of the items on the list are massive changes, which I am reluctant to make, but other items are really good points.

I noticed that most of the things that need to be improved are related to user interaction, not the game content itself; things like keyboard shortcuts for options and message boxes. So, I improved a lot of things and made it more user-friendly. Here are the changes I made:

• Added movement speed control in the options menu. The reason for adding this is that players quickly become accustomed to the atom movements and may want to accelerate the pace. It's really annoying to wait for the atoms to move when you're eager to make the next move.
• Added in-game keyboard shortcuts for enabling and disabling music, sound, and particle effects. While it's enjoyable to have all these features during the game, after a while, you might want to turn off the music or particle effects, so there you go!
• Enabled double-click functionality for loading and saving games. This is a nice touch to make loading and saving games easier.
• Added a message box with an error message when attempting to save a game with an illegal file name (for example, a file name that contains illegal characters).
• Added a warning message for when you try to quit to the main menu without saving the game. Accidentally quitting the game without saving your progress can be very frustrating, and this warning might save a lot of tears.
• Added tooltips to all options menu items. The tooltip box contains text that explains what each option does and provides the in-game shortcuts for it.
• Activated the NumPad keys for movement. Some players prefer using the NumPad keys over the normal arrow keys.

I will continue to improve the game and keep you updated!