Bellow is a quick 2 minute video that offers a few tips for creating better presentations. Hope it’s helpful.

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based on Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience (Ch. 8 )

These notes are from an interview of Dr. Eric Shaffer, CEO of Human Factors International, by Noah Shaffer, and can be found in Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience.

In this interview Dr. Eric Shaffer speak on how flexibility is important to game designers to craft things like story lines and challenge, however there needs to be a level of standardization when it comes to usability. He states, “players shouldn’t have to get creative in trying to figure out which button the designer decided to put the FIRE button in this level of the game…” (Isbister, 2008, Chapter 8, para. 2).

According to Dr. Eric Shaffer, the main area that require some sort of standard is the shell of the game. The shell includes all user interface elements like menus, head up display (HUD), and the controller. A nicely designed shell should disappear into the background. By disappearing he means that the player could feel so confident that he knows where to find the relevant information in the HUD, that less cognitive attention needs to be spent on it when it is not applicable to their current interaction.
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It has been a while since i’ve written about Flex development so I figured i would post up some useful code for anyone interested. Recently I have been dealing with a lot of 3rd party code which relies on a huge amount of external SWF assets which load into Flex using SWFLoader. The issue i ran into is that the developer getting access to <mx:Application /> from external SWF using the MovieClip(root) approach. This approach is a slight change to the old _root of the gloomy AS2 days. This created an extremely tightly coupled app, with mysterious methods scattered around the Flex project. There was no way of knowing who was calling these methods, if they where deprecated, or if it was actually being used by some external SWF. Did I mention that there are 60 SWFs all with code in the timeline. It is like finding a needle in a haystack. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t aware how tightly coupled these external swfs where and quickly proceeded to break the application whenever I attempted to refactor any code.

Obviously, calling <mx:Application /> to fake the old _root method of communicating with nested SWFs is not exactly the best way to go about this. Instead I favor using and Event driven approach.

This the code to create a simple external SWF with 5 textfields. Each textfield is clickable and will dispatch a custom event which broadcast the value of the textfield.
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