I'm the author. The control has a bool property, `forceEnd`. If this is set to false (the default value) the game doesn't end until the user lifts the finger. But the label tells the user that the loading has finished.
If the property is set to true the game ends when the loading finishes.
To be fair, if that's used instead of a traditional ad banner, then I think it's a great step forward. It's intrusive as it doesn't take up your operational screen real estate, however it is still extremely visible. And it's impact is when you're bored waiting for a sync which means the ad is more likely to get read than a traditional banner would.
Sadly though, I could see this being used in addition to traditional banners. :(
If the property `forceEnd` is set to false (the default value) the game ends when the user lifts the finger. The label tells the user when the loading finished.
When working on an early version of http://recent.io/, I added a physics animation of bouncing/falling balls during the network request to the server. When the network request completed, gravity pulled all the balls off the bottom of the screen.
Some early testers liked the animation, but it turned out engineering effort was better spent on getting the backend tuned for better performance. Now the request for user-specific news is down to around 500ms on WiFi, and the physics animation has gone away. :)
Wow, the first time I actually played Breakout was during the loading of a C64 game from its cassette drive. As there wasn't even a guarantee that that succeeded, I think I played the loading game more than the actual one.
Plus ca change…
(And it had parts of the theme from One Man and his Droid as the sole background music. So it's going to take a while until I can scrub that out of my hearing canal now…)
I recall some minigame-esque loading screens in some old Dragon Ball Z games and wondering why more games did do something similar. It's interesting to see there was actually a reason beyond simply missed opportunity.
Once upon a time, I worked for a social networking site where, in the early days, we had to take the whole site down for database migrations for hours at a time (the longest was the migration that allowed us to break free of this pattern, ironically). During the downtime we had a breakout game load instead of the site.
The funny part? We would get legitimate complaints when the site came back that the game was gone. We had to keep it up on an alternate page just so we could direct those people to it.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 80.0 ms ] threadWhats the use case? If the refresh takes a long time, is pull-to-refresh the best UX? If it doesn't, then you won't get a good game in?
If that's an open question, then this is the one thing that makes the answer a resounding YES.
Sadly though, I could see this being used in addition to traditional banners. :(
I wonder the first app to add something similar?
My bet is Snapchat. They always have fun pulldown animations.
however, consider the ramifications where losing a life on breakout drops your requests and makes you try again ...
might be a cool option for a 'youve refreshed too many times, beat this level or wait 10 seconds' scenario?
Some early testers liked the animation, but it turned out engineering effort was better spent on getting the backend tuned for better performance. Now the request for user-specific news is down to around 500ms on WiFi, and the physics animation has gone away. :)
Plus ca change…
(And it had parts of the theme from One Man and his Droid as the sole background music. So it's going to take a while until I can scrub that out of my hearing canal now…)
Since installs have become so prevalent in console games, I would love to see these sort of mini-games be used to ease the wait.
The funny part? We would get legitimate complaints when the site came back that the game was gone. We had to keep it up on an alternate page just so we could direct those people to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load