For me, I think the simple black text on a white background looks very cheaply done and that you didn't care to put the effort in.

The more concerning part and difficult on your part is after watching the trailer, I still had no idea what the point of the game was.

The kerning, maybe I can understand, but how is the rendering "ugly"? I don't understand. So far, I only get a very small handful of users saying this, and yet they don't have the words to explain why they think so. I don't see what makes it any worse than others with similar style to it.

Part of it's that the vertical lines are always lined up with the grid rather than being antialiased. On the surface this seems like it should be a good thing, but it makes the antialiasing stand out more than it should. Just compare it to actual Windows 8 text and you'll see there are definitely a few differences.

EDIT: You have to view the image at full size or else the down-sampling covers up the differences and makes it all look equally bad.

The fact is that it probably doesn't matter whether yours is objectively worse than "others with similar style;" the problem is that, since you're trying to emulate a particular style that people are very accustomed to seeing, any ways in which yours diverges from that style will make it look a slightly jarring and probably unprofessional. The way it is now it's sort of an uncanny valley thing where it's close, but not quite close enough, to what you're trying to make it look like.

The way I see it, if you want to avoid complaints about the font looking weird, you need to make it look either more or less like the real Windows 8 fonts.

Few if any potential customers of this game particularly care about the font. I'm getting a strong Linus Torvalds vibe from the advise offered in this thread. Lots of stuff that really hard core coders care about and little that %99.9 of the general population would notice or understand.

"Do you just draw circles around the dots to 'capture' them?", I wondered, then I saw you clear a whole screen of dots without drawing a circle and I got confused, and finally you collected a single dot without drawing a circle.

You draw a closed shape - whatever that may be. Everything inside the closed shape is "captured". It could be a circle, a square, doesn't matter.

It also looks like the cursor itself destroys/captures any dot that runs into it.

It looks like that blue dot is a "clear all" item. Sort of like a cherry that appears in Pac-Man. Just a random "helping" item that appears for the player to use.

I agree with noisecrime. I watched your trailer twice and still couldn't fully understand the conditions of winning.

"Do you just draw circles around the dots to 'capture' them?", I wondered, then I saw you clear a whole screen of dots without drawing a circle and I got confused, and finally you collected a single dot without drawing a circle.

I would have preferred your captions to explain the goals rather than "your actions in this game affect the outcome!" - if my actions didn't affect the outcome, would it be a game?

But yes, your logo remains on-screen for much longer than it should. You can cater to fast and slow readers by doing the following:

[fade black to white] -> show logo for 2 seconds -> [fade white to black] -> [fade black to white] -> show game screen with your logo in the bottom left corner

You draw the circle to 'destroy' the 'squares'. In the trailer, there's 3 different coloured squares and now there's four. Each colour square has a different function. The red squares are evil, you kill these and avoid being touched by these. The blue squares kill every square on the screen when you touch one. The green squares give you a force field that lasts until you touch a red square. The yellow square (which this trailer predates) slows down time to about 20% game speed and it gradually goes back up to 100%. I hope this doesn't come off as offensive (because it's not directed at any individuals), but if there's one thing I learned is never to assume anything is obvious. Some people were able to pick up the game concept right away and what each square did by the trailer alone, others get confused and say "Okay, what is the objective of this game?" I'll be replacing the filler text with something more informative. I like the idea of putting the logo in the corner, I'll try that.

For me, I think the simple black text on a white background looks very cheaply done and that you didn't care to put the effort in.

The more concerning part and difficult on your part is after watching the trailer, I still had no idea what the point of the game was.

Your first statement is pretty much what I thought of the whole Win8 concept, but it turns out people like it. Using something other than a white background and black text probably won't go well with this game.

The kerning, maybe I can understand, but how is the rendering "ugly"? I don't understand. So far, I only get a very small handful of users saying this, and yet they don't have the words to explain why they think so. I don't see what makes it any worse than others with similar style to it.

Part of it's that the vertical lines are always lined up with the grid rather than being antialiased. On the surface this seems like it should be a good thing, but it makes the antialiasing stand out more than it should. Just compare it to actual Windows 8 text and you'll see there are definitely a few differences.

EDIT: You have to view the image at full size or else the down-sampling covers up the differences and makes it all look equally bad.

The fact is that it probably doesn't matter whether yours is objectively worse than "others with similar style;" the problem is that, since you're trying to emulate a particular style that people are very accustomed to seeing, any ways in which yours diverges from that style will make it look a slightly jarring and probably unprofessional. The way it is now it's sort of an uncanny valley thing where it's close, but not quite close enough, to what you're trying to make it look like.

The way I see it, if you want to avoid complaints about the font looking weird, you need to make it look either more or less like the real Windows 8 fonts.

Okay, I think I understand what you're saying now, but here's where I hit my problem (font wise). I have to find a way to make this font accessible for all platforms. I can easily use freetype-gl, but then that would kill my iOS support since I don't have an OpenGL ES 2.0 device. All I have is an iPod Touch 1st Gen and a iPhone 3G. This should change by next month at the earliest since my new contract doesn't begin until next week at the latest, and I don't get paid until about 2-3 weeks later. In this case, I may have to push back the release date further for this (for iOS at least). Maybe it would be too much to release everything at the same time anyway.

Thanks.

Shogun.

Few if any potential customers of this game particularly care about the font. I'm getting a strong Linus Torvalds vibe from the advise offered in this thread. Lots of stuff that really hard core coders care about and little that %99.9 of the general population would notice or understand.

"Do you just draw circles around the dots to 'capture' them?", I wondered, then I saw you clear a whole screen of dots without drawing a circle and I got confused, and finally you collected a single dot without drawing a circle.

You draw a closed shape - whatever that may be. Everything inside the closed shape is "captured". It could be a circle, a square, doesn't matter.

It also looks like the cursor itself destroys/captures any dot that runs into it.

It looks like that blue dot is a "clear all" item. Sort of like a cherry that appears in Pac-Man. Just a random "helping" item that appears for the player to use.

Oops, didn't catch your post, sorry about that.

While I do agree that having a font that more suitably matches the style I'm aiming for would be a good idea, the font itself is one thing that most people (particularly the technically uninclined) didn't care about the font.

Oh, and you're right about how the gameplay works in general, but you can only touch squares that aren't red. The red ones will kill you, also touching the side will kill you. The blue one does just as you described and the green one gives you a force field. Now there's a yellow one too, but you'll see that in the next attempt of a trailer.

Shogun.