Yesterday here at Bytewire we had a most interesting debate about something which was seemingly un-important when it began. Let me explain the situation and set the scene quickly, before I dive right into the debate at hand.

Our popular online game, Street Crime, which we have been developing for over 2 years now has a reasonably intuitive, clever design and interface. However as we have expanded on the game and built lots of new features we have found the left hand menu, which importantly is our main menu in the game growing increasingly vertically larger and is now in our opinion a little overwhelming for new players. The left hand menu is divided into subsections and each subsection is collapsable and expandable and the state is held as the user flicks through pages. The left hand menu consists of around 40-50 links to other pages, which is pretty large as things go.

So along comes Friday and we have a new feature to release into Street Crime, yet we are not sure where it belongs, on the one hand we want our players to see it but on the other hand we have got to draw the line at making the left hand menu larger and larger, somewhere right!? Looking at this in more detail made us start to think, how incredibly important menus, navigations and terminology of the items in the menu really, really was to our game and to the players playing it. After about an hour of deliberation we had split our views into two seperate view points or theories if you like.

The Blue Pill or The Spoon Fed Approach

The first of which is the Blue Pill or the Spoon Fed approach which regards users as thickle, lazy and that they require spoon feeding to find what they are looking for. We Adopted the blue pill/red pill matrix scene to our game, arguing that if you opted to take the blue pill, you are thickle and you want everything in front of you in an easy navigation menu with a simple one click depth and you are happy that you know this is where you will find everything and that it will only be a case of scowering through the long menu list to find what your looking for, look hard enough and you will find it. By looking at this approach we identified some pro’s and con’s particularly adapted to the way our online ‘game’ works.

Cons

• Menu items get forgotten about as they are hidden by the player to make the menu small and manageable enough.
• New players feel overwhelmed by a large menu
• Forcibly not allowing a user to explore deeper into the rabbit hole at his or her own leisure.
• Get what you click approach – not always the best approach especially not so for online games.

Pros

• Its quick
• Minimal effort
• You get what you click
• Everything is in the menu somewhere approach

The Red Pill or Depth In Pages Approach

“Take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes”.

Adapted from the matrix we thought up this approach amongst the theory that users are so thickle that if they need to find something that they know exists somewhere on your site, they will sure as hell try to find it. Which importantly for a online game, creates a contact point, especially so for online games with a chat facility – “hey does anyone know where i can find the weapons shop?” etc. It also allows you to think more logically about how your game is put together, ie, some pages relate directly to another so why not link back and forth to each one from that page. The more time a player can spend navigating around without returning to use the left hand menu the greater depth and indulgence you have managed to achieve. What this would also allow us to do is to spend time making our menu as concise as possible. Cutting it down from 50 items to just 10 and cutting out the collapsible and foldable menus. Take the example below for instance.

Current Menu

• Game Forum
• Off-topic Forum
• Crew Forum
• Bug Forum

Making this more concise could mean a link in the menu with “forums” which takes you to an overview page, perhaps with the 10 latest posts accross all forums and then links to the individual forums themselves. You have added another click level, but you’ve also improved the experience and likelyhood of them getting involved. As you have made the forums link more viewable and you’ve added an easy way for people to jump right into a thread from the overview page.

New Menu

• Forums

Another important factor to always remember when using a long list style navigation menu is that if its long, its likely areas are going to be forgotten about or due to the page fold don’t get visited as much as they should. This is the wrong approach especially with a social game. For us currently our forums are situated at the very bottom of our long menu and thus probably dont receive as much clicks and visits as they should do. With a new shortened menu, we can really put more emphasis on the real important aspects of the site in the menu and link the less important pages using a depth approach, clever linking and page relationships.

Cons

• All menu items and pages within the game are not accessible on a one click basis
• Lazy players may suffer.
• If implemented badly could add an annoying amount of extra clicks and time to perform routine tasks

Pros

• Intuitive
• Its not overwhelming at first and it lets the user dive deeper into the rabbit hole as and when they feel comfortable doing it.
• Its small and it makes sense

Although my opinion clearly sways to towards the Red Pill approach, this is not to say it will work on our site or indeed on your site. However, what you might be interested to know is we are going to run some tests and analysis of both approaches and see which one works better for us and then of course go ahead and implement it. If your interested to see how we get on and or would like to read our findings be sure to follow us on twitter @Bytewire.

We have released our latest online game, Street Crime which is a thrilling gangster game mmorpg, emerse yourself in the world of a gangster.

What is Street Crime?
Street Crime is an massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). Street Crime is based on a gangster theme whereby you create a character and aim to reach the top and become a Godfather. Along the way you will come across various hurdles.
What can I do on Street Crime
Street Crime offers a wide variety of features including Organised Crime, Property, Street Racing, Poker and more.
Who is Street Crime aimed at?
Street Crime is aimed at everyone and at any ages. Street Crime has a variety of players from different nationalities, everyone is welcome.
How can I play Street Crime?
To sign up to Street Crime visit: www.streetcrime.cc

Over the last week or so we have been watching over street crime and noticed a huge overload of bullets in the system.

This is mainly due to a small drop in players and the city bullet factories producing far too many bullets per day for the amount of players that they serve. The consequence of which has meant that players have managed to get there hands on large amounts of bullets relatively easily.

So as of just now, the city bullet factories will produce only 500 bullets an hour. For the same amount of lead and cash as before. We hope by doing this it will provide more competition for bullets and thus more enjoyment for you guys.

We have also lowered the amount that personal bullet factories make to reflect the following:

Small : 100 bullets
Medium : 150 bullets
Large : 200 bullets
Huge : 300 bullets

Hourly, providing you have 100,000 cash and 100kg of lead and that you have turned your factories production on at the inventory page.

We have also fixed some bugs in kill which had been leading to some minor problems with crew leaders and crews not dropping. This has now been rectified.

Stay tuned to find out more about new moderators, editors and helpdesk members shortly.

Play Street Crime Gangster Game now >

Street Crime Staff

Today we made some slight changes to the menu and adjusted a few features.

Property has been renamed as Real Estate.

We revamped and renamed the selling and buying of credits and as of tommorow morning non paying accounts will be able to buy credits to make themselves a member from other players. This can be done using the credit auctions page, found under the Investment menu tab.

Importantly we have re-jigged the menu and because of this a few of the features names have changed they are listed below:-

Property became Real Estate
Personal became My Account
Users online became Gangsters Online
Player ideas became Idea Box

And we also ordered the menu around slightly differently into a layout which we think is slight better for the game.

We hope you agree.

Thanks
Street Crime Staff

NEW FEATURES

Today we have added some new features to Street Crime,

Testament

This new feature allows you to designate a character to receive some of your items which before you would not have received back when you die.
By setting a player as your testament this player will receive 40% of the money in your bank and all of your vehicles in your garage.

You can only set a Testament if your a paying member and this can be done at your Personal page under the ‘Main’ tab.

Perhaps this will ease the pain of having your brains blown out?

Player Ideas

As part of our continued dedication to you as the players we have decided to make a full idea making and voting area. This can be found under the communications tab at the bottom. Or here Ideas page.

Here you can view and create ideas for street crime. You can also now vote for ideas that you really like, if a idea is feasible and is supported by a large amount of players it will be implemented.

You will only be able to create a new idea once every 24 hours and vote once on each idea.

We have also made some other small tweaks around the place.

Thanks
The Street Crime Staff