As we approach the holiday season, we remain hard at work. We love that Trip the Light is out there in the world. Anyone who wants to see the result of the last three years of development and innovation can now pick up an early access version of the game and join us on the dance floor.
One of the greatest advantages of our early access launch is the chance to see your feedback and reviews. We read every single one, and we take your feedback incredibly seriously. When we say that by joining us in this early access period, you become a partner, we really mean it. Every star, every comment, every rating means the world to us and helps us make the music that moves you.
As with last week, this week I was invited to be a flower on the wall of one of our development meetings. The subject was refining the user interface for our teaching mode.
You know, it is funny, but the name of our teaching mode has been the subject of a fair amount of internal discussion around here. Names have been an interesting point of discussion generally. When we launched the game in early access, each of the modes had the name we had been calling that mode internally, but internal naming conventions are not always the best. They evolve organically, without a lot of conscious discussion about what serves the user. They develop because they serve the developers’ needs, but perhaps do not best serve the users’ needs. While every developer on our team is also a user—we all love playing the game—it falls to us to try to think outside of ourselves and come up with the names that will be the most intuitive, accessible, and convenient for you.
As a result, you can probably expect to see the names of certain features and buttons in the game change in the coming weeks.
Let me lay out an example of one quick internal discussion on this subject.
Right now, there is a mode called Salsa 101. We hope that you will see that and immediately understand that pressing that button will take you to an accessible, beginner-level mode that teaches you the very basic steps of salsa dancing. However, as the app grows, we know we are going to teach more dance styles, beyond salsa.
What we have not decided is what to do with the name. Will Salsa 101 change its name to “Dance 101,” and then Salsa 101 be underneath it, along with the other modes? Or should we call the category “teaching mode?” Sometimes we make reference, internally, to “Teaching Mode,” but one team member pointed out that “teaching” is looking at the mode from our perspective, as the game’s developers. Thus, we should probably call it “Learning Mode” since learning with what you, as the user, get out of it.
I know this seems tiny—a semantic discussion about the difference between “teaching” and “learning,”—and yet: game development, like so much else in life, is just the accumulation of thousands of these tiny little decisions. We want to make sure every decision we make builds up to a fantastic, enjoyable, intuitively easy-to-engage-with game that you can slip into any time. If we do this right, you will not have to think about the names of things at all. That way, you can just listen for the music, keep your body moving, and dance with us!