Plaidophile

I hate marketing-driven technology decisions.

Aall of my interface designs were totally easy to use and intuitive. We had zero complaints about any of my UI stuff in the focus testing. It's a very good, strong, optimal interface which makes use of both screens.

But the marketing wonks at UbiSoft were like, "We need to take advantage of the touchscreen because we need to use as many of the DS features as we can." They also wanted us to graft on wireless multiplayer gaming (which would be a neat trick considering we don't even have any way of testing it, and even if we did how can you write something like that in just three weeks when there's already a huge active task list left to do?) and I'm sure they're bemoaning our lack of using 3D for anything.

Anyway. The DS only has a touchscreen on the bottom, so anything interactive and clickable has to go on the bottom (so much for my slick two-screen interface). And with the amounts of text and inventory items and so on, the click targets are pretty tiny, especially for scroll bars or little up/down arrows or whatever. The scrollbars are currently just a decoration to show people how many choices are available, but in order to make stuff work with the touchscreen we need to be able to make the scrollbars an active element and so on since otherwise people will have no obvious way to select things offscreen (of course I'll also make it so people can just click the top and bottom edges of the choice box or whatever but that's still hackish).

But I bet nobody will even use it because it'd be STUPID. Everyone will just complain about how crappy the user interface is because they're all going to try to use the touchpad because it's what marketing wants them to do, rather than just using the robust d-pad interface which works very well. The people who do just use the d-pad will wonder why we just grafted on the touchpad support and be like "Oh they just did it to claim they're using the touchpad when really they're not." But that'll be true.

You don't need to tell me that touchscreen UIs aren't necessarily good, and that in this case the touchscreen is pointless and stupid. I know this. The other programmers know this. The producer knows this. the writers are totally indifferent and in their own little world anyway but I'm sure if they were asked they'd know this too. But the fucking marketing shits at UbiSoft don't care. Instead of seeing the touchscreen as something to enable new gameplay ideas, they want it to be mapped onto old gameplay ideas even where it doesn't fucking fit (like in dialog choice boxes).

So now I'm wasting my time which could be better spent on IMPORTANT STUFF (like items on this really long task list which needs to be completed in three weeks) totally rewriting the interface, to keep a couple of marketing wonks happy.

Argh.