PokemonGO – Tech Righting

Nurse Joy has been secretly replaced with Hermes Conrad

When I originally imagined a revamping of the heal my Pokemon system with a “Nurse Joy” button, I was still operating, as a new player would, from a place of scarcity and curation.

Now the game is overrun (at least in my part of the world) with megaplayers. Jixny3829 and Jinxny4293 and Jinxny084 to invent a few examples. Niantic and Nintendo don’t care, it means more money.

But they have, at long last, somewhat improved the healing system. You can now group heal your Pokemon in bulk! Or selected groups.

Category: Free Beta Testers, Niantic, PokemonGO | Comments Off

December 19

PokémonGO Buddy Gameplay Upgrade: Broken Buddies?

I got into tech writing (and righting) because I wanted to understand and improve technology more. But my approach to efficient (lazy path, minimal clicks) gameplay made me think the old buddy stats were broken or gone due to this week’s PokémonGO client update.

I’d walked nearly 20km to evolve a Feebas last week, but the update insisted he had 0km on his counter … or maybe 3.1km.

After a ridiculous amount chasing through menus, I found the right count. But did it really need to be gone? Maybe so. Because the cost to ‘right’ it might be too high.

How I think the feature replacement went down

Category: Data Architecture, Free Beta Testers, games, Niantic, PokemonGO, User eXperience | Comments Off

June 1

Designing your mobile game to flail: A look at the UX in PokémonGO

Birthday Pikachu imagined with a dedicated healing menu

Years and years ago, there was a really great Super Bowl ad for a job site called monster.com. The premise was kids dreaming aloud of grown up jobs, but speaking of their dreams in ridiculous terms. The one that resonated most with me at the time was a dead serious tween: “I want to file all day.” Nobody wants to file all day.

And this goes for gamers, too. The equivalent of filing in video games is organizing and maintaining your inventory. Chasing through ridiculous amounts of menus just sucks the enjoyment right out of the game. No gamer is thinking to themselves: “I want to click through menus all day.”

But that is exactly what you do in PokémonGO. Click through unnecessary menus all darn day. It hurts gameplay, and I bet it’s even suppressing recurring player counts.

I’ve been playing PokémonGO on and off since it’s public release. There have been some changes to the “capture” side of the gameplay that are fantastic. Improvements to the “battle” side of the gameplay experience are still lacking, however.

Capture Gameplay Improvements:

Sliding Capture Menus
Appraisal function on the secondary character screen
Buddy System

Category: Data Architecture, fix it already, games, Niantic, PokemonGO, User eXperience | Comments Off