When is Netflix ready? And Spotify? Steam?
One of the most challenging aspects of developing a service is that things are always in flux: what you put on the market on Day 1 is going to look different from what’s on offer on Day 60, and radically transfigured a year or two later. The bright side is that services can be continuously improved: if done right, the product should mature under your eyes.
How constant upgrades will benefit gamers
One example of the benefits of this iterative model comes from our work on — you guessed it — the Kingdomino tutorial. Besides addressing the request for a separate scoring add-on (coming in the next update on both iOS and Android), it also allowed us to get a glimpse of what “improving on the rules” looks like.
The original Kingdomino rulebook features this image:
Building the Tutorial, we presented the box like you can see here below.
At some point, Blue Orange pointed out that we were doing the box wrong. If you go back to the image from the rulebook and spend some time with it, you’ll see that the box is actually tilted, so that the dominoes can take advantage of gravity and are arranged nicely independently from how many are used in that specific game.
Because of the unusual angle used in the rulebook, we didn’t realize it was tilted until we officially heard it from the publisher. In one of the upcoming Dized updates you’ll see the box oriented like this:
This small hiccup during the development process is useful for everybody: we know we can update and improve how the Tutorial explains the rules, and the publisher realizes that perhaps the rulebook could use a less ambiguous angle.
In time, this same principle will be valid for all aspects of Dized. Imagine for example several players searching without luck for some obscure edge case in our Rules: we’ll know right away, and will be able to notify the publisher, which will in return offer an official reply through Dized, without the need of issuing an errata or a new PDF version of the rules. Sounds convenient? We know it is.
Stay tuned for the next piece, where we will show in more details what different teams do at our Helsinki headquarter!
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Errata slip image Courtesy of The New York Academy of Medicine Library
