Okay, last weekend I got my game to a stage I could call it a BETA. I asked some (well, generally all who were interested) of my friends to test the game and provide me some feedback. I posted this to FB, Twitter and LinkedIn. Luckily I got a decent bunch of friends who wanted to help me. Thank you for everyone!
One of the major issues what I was not aware of was the screen scaling in smaller resolution devices. I thought I got it handled but I didn’t. With smaller screens some of the elements were drawn nicely but some were on top of each other and so on. And my custom font was drawn unintentionally large (without no scaling). It was my own mistake not to test with smaller resolutions and partially because testing with Emulator is painfully slow.
It took me a while to fix all the places with the scaling and with newer version even smaller screens started to working better. I still have some issues with AdMob sizes. I know there’s a table of the sizes but I cannot allocate so big portions of the screen for ads. I have to think of another way.
One issue was orientation related. I had fixed the orientation to landscape and I thought I did it the right way. It seems that with some tablets you can use the “case” or cover to create a stand and have the device supported by the stand so that the orientation is actually landscape reverse and since mine was fixed to normal landscape the game was upside down. This was easy to solve by changing the orientation to android:screenOrientation=”sensorLandscape”.
The game didn’t crash for most of the testers and there’s just one unknown bug related to gestures that causes crash on one particular device / user (that was HTC one). I wonder if this is related to android version or what. I was of course happy in general because game seems to be very stable.
One thing testers wanted the most was some kind of help or hint / tip. I originally didn’t have that type of functionality in mind but I started to think that maybe it could be a good thing. I yet have to figure out how to implement it and come up with things like how the amount of hints are granted / created or where to get them, but currently the amount is just static number.
This is currently under development. Some of the words, specially for non native, can be pretty difficult.
What is cloque anyway 😉 ? Even WordPress auto correction doesn’t recognize the word! Duh, according to Wiktionary:
cloque
- A fabric with an embossed design.
Oh well. Maybe it’s just me then… 🙂 🙂
p.s. If you have been following this you notice one extra button as well. I put a clear -button in place to clear the current guessed word. It became useful as well.
MyOwnException 