Shapes and Lines

…the man who buys it doesn’t use it, the man who uses it isn’t at all happy about it and would really appreciate it if the guys who build those automated form pages would actually try using the things they build.

You know the sort I’m talking about, the customer complaint and tech support form pages. Those perfect walls of anonymity and indifference that have taken the place of any real or tangible customer support for most businesses these days.

A week or so ago I spent the better part of my afternoon trying to purchase the update to a high end modeling program I use. It was a small update for the full version I bought about six months ago, and assumed it would be as easy at visiting their site and purchasing it like I had before.

To make a long story short and get to my actual point, three hours later I gave up in complete frustration and bewilderment. I was standing there, a returning customer with cash in hand, but due to lack of information on the web site, broken, buried, and obfuscated links, invalid support email addresses, and form responses that didn’t answer my question or point me in the right direction, I gave up.

Apparently I spent so much time on the site that I triggered a user feedback study that offered me the chance to “help improve the user experience”, so I opted in and went through the thirty or so questions. I expected I’d be contact after giving the site what I was sure was the lowest possible rating. But I was wrong.

I should say however that the study I opted in to was very nice indeed, and I would be happy to recommend it to others…

I reminded myself that I should try to be part of the solution, rather than just bitching about the problem. So I clicked the link to submit a report via their automated form.

After typing it out in an email as concisely as possible and spell checking it ..then editing out the more frustrated language, I tried to paste it into the form only to be greeted with an error message that I had “exceeded the allowed number of characters”, which was so woefully low I may as well have tweeted the damn thing to the company

God knows the 140 character limit of a tweet would’ve been more verbose.

Intermission and obligatory pic. this one is a follow up to my last posted image and a little bit cleaned in the execution I think.

A short time later while I was going totally Hulk and rampaging through my two peanut butter sandwich lunch, I received a form email response that was Identical to my previous ..and had nothing to do with my submitted report.

That is what I call a defining user experience. A mental bookmark that you revisit, consciously or unconsciously, every time the subject, in this case a particular software producer, is encountered. Sort of like the first time a little kid touches something hot, or you eat a whole box of Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch Berries in one setting. It’s and experience you won’t soon forget it.

Today was another roller coaster ride with automated forms. This time it was one of the biggest game developers in the business, and I have to say that their form system was better than my previous experience, but sort of in the way a poke in the eye is better than stepping in a bear trap.

As a guy I use to work with like to say, “lower your expectations and everything will be kick@$$”. Which I suppose if fine if that’s what you’re going for, but I’d suggest “removing the suck” as an alternate approach.

-Todd
www.shapesandlines.com

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…or don’t, if you prefer S.N.A.F.U.

The recent release of my Enchanted Forest Environment Pack was well received and I’ve had a lot of positive feedback on it so far. Granted it’s only been live for two and a half days, so I may be celebrating a little prematurely.

It’s been a very busy month for me and looks to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

I put in a very long four weeks on a seriously kick @$$ project for Bad Habit Software, game environment, avatars, load screens, GUI’s, and particles effects. That’s wrapping up and now I find myself immersed in two new environments development projects. But it’s too soon to show them off, so I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Obligatory post image: this is a screen cap of a MudBox sculpt I  started on last night.  One of about a dozen I’ve done this week. Still a long way to go on this one.

The reality of most game development is that high-end asset generation (normal maps, specular, ambient occlusion, etc) via Sub-D modeling or high poly sculpts, often simply isn’t justified by the time involved.

Unless you are talking about character generation and a few other exceptions, the bulk of content is best (bang for your buck) created via tools like Crazy Bump, or Shader Map Pro.

However, knowing when to make that call requires you to know the in’s and out’s of both. It takes a master to make a complicated task seem simple. And there are no short cuts getting there.

But there are principles and practices that will help you along the way. Sort of like “Don’t take candy from strangers …unless they’re distracted”, and  “Never pee uphill”, or that there is no right answer to “do these pants make me look fat”, which inevitably leads to your evening being F.U.B.A.R’d.

Einstein’s said “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”. Or as Da Vinci  put it “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

At the end of the day, time really is money. The sooner a developer learns to reconcile that with the passion for their craft as an artist, coder, or otherwise, the happier and more effective they will be. That’s no easy juggleing act.

I was going to write more about this from a project planning perspective, but the sun is shining, so I’m going for a run.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

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