Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

With the launch of The Lord of the Rings Online soon, I thought it would be a good idea to look at several angles of the game to see what’s under the hood. In the last article, I covered the character creation screen and the steps you went through to create a character. In this part, I will look at the interface of the game and what all the buttons do and how they are laid out. Each picture can be clicked on for a full size 1920×1200 picture.

The toolbar at the bottom of the screen is your main interface for the game. The buttons on the left bring up things like your quests or options, while the buttons on the far right bring up the five bags you have for inventory. The middle of the toolbar is where you put your special skills that you have learned, similar to the way that Guild Wars works.

This screen is a picture with the character bio screen pressed. The layout gives you all the info about a character over multiple tabs. You can see things like your title or skills that you may have mastered. You can also read your character’s bio and even where they fit into the war. This screen presents a lot of data and as with all the other screens, can be moved anywhere on the screen.

Here we have the crafting window open. This windows shows off all of the crafting skills that you have. Currently, this character has no crafting skills as I have just started playing. But crafting will be important as it is in World of Warcraft and all other fantasy MMORPG games.

This windows shows us all the property that you own. From my understanding, you will be able to own multiple plots of land and homes. I am not sure if it will allow for player run cities, but if the economy in the game takes off, anything is possible. Again, I have no property at this stage of the game, so I have no property.

The social screen is filled with quite a bit of info. The following tab shows off anyone in the general area, while the friends tab shows off your friends and if they are in the game or not. The kinship tab was interesting, because it looked like you can have siblings in the game that you can play as they get older. A new kind of dynamic, but I have to wonder if those characters will count towards your character limit (not sure if there is one yet).

The quest screen shows off all the quests that you have. It can be configured to show finished quests and gives you details on the quests that you have so far. I never had too many outstanding quests early in the game, so it was hard to find a shot where I had quests showing.

All in all, the interface is nice. They seem to have used Guild Wars as a model and then fixed up or added some twists of their own. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but if you are trying to get people into your game, then you should do some more to individualize the game to set it apart, lookwise from the game.

Read here for the first part in this series.