Hi. First of all some transparency: i am one of 3 designers/developers working on the Tempest Game Clock some but this is not an ad for that, this is a call for some help from the Go community. Originally Tempest was envisioned as a chess clock and it does that very well. But since going on kickstarter, our founders have been hearing from Go players repeatedly to add byo-yomi. Our founders being chess players, asked me (a terrible go player!) to solve for ‘including a beautifully simple version of byo yomi, that prioritizes the most common go time controls, in order to keep it simple.’ there is a huge value placed on simplicity on tempest, so i have a problem. the more i read about go timing methods, the more overwhelmed im getting. and i don’t want to clutter the UI with 100 options. tempest is set so simply compared to dgt, game time, and other clocks we have benchmarked, that it’s almost like go itself : simple rules, beautiful results.
TO SET other time controls on it, users just swipe for MAIN GAME minutes (from 1min up to 2 hours). That’s it! no press and hold and tap tap tap and ‘mode’ this and ‘select’ that. It’s just swipe and play. bam. Now with chess, there are also increments (seconds added per move) but the game ends when main time end. incrments are also set by swipe. so to set blitz chess 5min + 2sec increments, you just swipe min and swipe seconds. the end. (yes, there are super advanced tournament time controls that this doesn’t address, but for 99% of uses the simplification of the UI is so worth it).
So: how to do this with byo yomi for go players? I would like some feedback or even direct engaged help from someone here offline perhaps. Our thought is that if 90% of go timing is covered by one primary method that we could (for now!) dispense with all the corner case. But what would that look like? My thought is: using the same swipe/swipe & play method as the above, we could say: Swipe for main time (as usual), but choose byoyomi (not incrments) by clicking the increment button to make it a [1] (1 extra period) where you then swipe the seconds (from 1 to 60, though this could be increased if you tell me it should) to indicate the byo-yomi time period… want more periods? just click that [1] to make it a [2] or a [3] etc… so you’d see a screen that basically looks like this: 60 [5] 60 and that would mean 60min for main time plus 5 periods of byoyomi of 60seconds each. and that whole ui would fit the tempest model perfectly as a super simple: swipe-swipe-set-it.
what i don’t know is does this capture 90% of casual (or tournament) time control needs without going into advanced corner cases…im working on a story board wireframe of this setting method right now. so i very much appreciate any help i get on this… who knows, i might even part with my tempest sample if someone wants to jump onto zoom to stress test this thing!
i hope i have convinced you that this is not an ad, but a call for help! so i am very respectfully pasting a link for anyone that is just wanting to see what i’m talking about for clarity. please don’t consider this spam, or if you do please tell me and i’ll remove the posting or rephrase my ask, but really i am trying to make a better product for go players, nothing more… here is what im refering to… so far byo yomi is just ‘announced’ but not yet developed though:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/te ... ref=51pkmfWith respect and thanks in advance for your help.
Tom.