Hello,

In a previous discussion I mentioned that I would re-tool the demo for Wonderland to

(a) include a new (?) approach for mailing collections
and
(b) make a much "harder" in-game sales pitch.

The changes are now complete, the demo is available here:
http://www.midnightsynergy.com/wonderland/wonderld.exe

(note that this is not the same demo as can be currently downloaded from my main site - I'm still doing final tests)

I won't say much about the changes, since I would really like to hear your feedback, except that it is a multi-layered attack ;) and I actually think it might work very well (Wonderland has always converted extremely well - I want to see how far the conversion rate can be pushed).

Just one comment - I didn't bother translating the new sales pitches into different languages, so if you switch to French or German in the options screen you can see what the old sales-pitch was like.

Phew. Next, I think I need to do a few minor changes to my website.

Cheers,
Patrick

I don't know if you're looking for overall comments, but here's some anyway :)

The level and detail of the snag screens feels good, not obtrusive or annoying, but very informative (heck, I still have the Halo PC free demo, that rewards the player with a 3 minute unstopable commercial when he quits :mad: ). Your incentive for email addresses is a good one, I hope it works out.

The game is a nice package, but I feel it's badly let down by the splash screen / startup menu.

It's far too static for my liking; for example, it's not obvious that the screen resolution/bit-depth/windowed options can actually be changed so I can imagine a lot of novices going straight for "Play" and never seeing anything better than 640x480 16-bit fullscreen. A simple "mouse over" highlight would be nice (or some dynamic text somewhere), it makes the user aware that they're there for the clicking.

Same goes for the "Play" and "Level Solutions" buttons. Maybe I'm too used XP and fancy highlight buttons, but I clicked "Play" from a sense of desperation, hoping that the darned thing hadn't locked up. So, from a menu of that low quality I didn't expect to find much behind it, which is doing your game a great injustice.

I hope you take this as constructive critisism :D

- Matt

Very cool. I had a similar idea for getting email addresses (offering secret levels in exhange for emails) but I was thinking more along the lines of asking people to recommend the game to a friend in order to get the secret code. Perhaps just collecting email addresses is better. It's easier to verify, anyway.

I didn't think the new sales pitch was "hard", just more informative. I like the idea of a multi-page sales pitch that is controllable by the user. I think I'll add that to the Donut Factory.

Keep us posted on how the email address collection works!

~Hanford

Thanks both for your input...

matibee: I hadn't really thought about the splash screen much - thanks for your comment, I'll have to think about that a little. Anyone else feel the same way?

hanford: I'll post some info later down the road about the collection process - e-mails have started to trickle in, so that's a good start (just made the new demo 'live' on the weekend).

I also thought about adding a "customer comments" section, since I have some very exuberant ones ;), but I opted to just stick with reviews at this point.

Cheers,
Patrick