Alright champs and champettes, next for another installment!

One of the pain points we mentioned earlier was actually starting a match. The problem with the old guns is once you turn them on they are "hot" meaning they can damage other guns. So while you are trying to get everyone on the right teams, or answering questions, people are firing around, making everyone needing to restart their guns over and over again.

Hongwei and I are pretty smart dudes and we have solved this problem. We designed the OS of the guns to have 3 sections: Pre-game, Game time, and Post-game. Crazy original and exciting, I know. This post will be covering how we fixed the problems in the pre game.

Let's do this!

We divided the pre-game into 4 screens. Stats, Team selection, Game time selection, and Begin Game screen. You progress through these screens using the trigger, and modify the variables on screen using the two controls buttons by the screen.

The stats screen has 3 sections. Name and owner!

Health, gun type, and fire type!

The business screen. Rate of fire, Reload time, Damage per shot, and clip size.

Pulling the trigger on any of these screens will progress you through the game time selection screen, and then team selection. and finally you come to the confirmation screen.

Do you feel lucky?

Here the control buttons change your choice. Pulling the trigger on "yes" starts the game, pulling on "no" (which it is defaulted too) will simply loop you back to the stats screen. 

The defaults for the games are the most common settings we've used (10 minute games with no teams), therefore to start up your standard game it takes a few trigger pulls, one control button press and your ready to go.

This may read like it's complex, but it's quite intuitive. I've had about half a dozen people take a dry run at it with no prompting and they picked up the control scheme in seconds. The UI is very "reversable" meaning you can easily get back to a state you were once in, while still making it clear how to start a game.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it.