The power of seeing someone play your game

Last week I went to Taiwan to visit a bunch of old friends. I stayed at my buddy Jay's place and had the chance to see him try out my most recent game. In about 15 minutes, I got more useful feedback from that than I had from dozens of messages and emails from various people online.

When he first started, he skipped the instructions. That's pretty much what I'd expected. But he wasn't sure how to get gold in the game. The shop interface confused him due to the way I'd named things. Selecting Return took him to the main menu of the shop, instead of out of the shop as he'd hoped. The way selling worked was a surprise. In the end, he only had money to buy a couple of terrible pieces, with which he promptly lost. If not for the fact that he knew the maker of the game, he never would have tried it again.

Seeing someone repeatedly curse (or at least want to curse) the interface for something you've made is pretty enlightening. I knew exactly which spots were annoying. It didn't take long at all to rename Return into Leave. I also eliminated the hierarchical structure of the shop altogether and made a menu for all the options stay at the top at all times. This way users could browse the blocks for sale and then go directly to looking at the ones they already had without having to go back to a main menu first. Jay gave several other interface suggestions, some of which I've already implemented.

The other major problem I realized was that my game was way the heck too hard. This I also blame on doing almost all the playtesting myself. As I built the game, I became very familiar with its interface and with the strategies needed to do well. What felt easy to me was way to hard for anyone playing it for the first time. As I saw my friend play the game, I slowly came to the realization that there were things I'd included in the game, things that I'd worked hard on that nobody except myself ever saw. What's the point of creating a super powerful item that slows time in the game if nobody ever knows of its existance? I've heard that this is a common problem with playtesters who continue testing a game for too long-- they get a totally skewed idea about its level of difficulty.

As a result of seeing the game played, I now understand why the kongregate rating was so poor. I also have a clear path towards improving the experience. With that knowledge, I've decided not to work on my robots with lasers game idea yet. I'm going to improve Block Merchant. As far as I see it, the game wasn't done when I released it. Unfortunately, it's not really going to get much more feedback from kongregate users, but I can at least make it a better game. I think I'll budget myself 15 hours of work on it before I try putting it up on newgrounds or another site.

More work, but poorly recieved

I put significantly more effort into Block Merchant than I did into the last game. The programming logic was more difficult; I didn't get it working properly until after thinking of a way of making a grid system. There was actual artwork, however simple involved. I also made made a shiny title screen composed of multiple alpha layers. I definitely learned a decent amount making it, but it wasn't well liked at all by the few people who played it on Kongregate. I got some feedback from them at least, but it is still a bit of a bummer. I think it's possible that the bar for free flash games is higher than it was six months ago. There are so many others such as myself who have followed various tutorials and started making games that the casual gamer's patience for familiar concepts is much less than it used to be.

I see two ways to go from here.

  1. Make improvements. It still won't make much of any revenue since it's not that novel. It will be much better liked after getting some polish, though. Also, it might be good for me to try to actually make something a bit higher quality.

  2. Make a new game. I'm thinking of programmable robots that you fight against each other. It would probably have more of a chance of gaining some traction. I'd also learn more from a new project than continued work on an old one.

My third game – Block Merchant

My third full flash game is finally done! While my last one, Juggle Basher was essentially just a breakout clone, Block Merchant goes beyond the many tetris clones out there. It has different pieces, a new game mechanic of money and a shop which allows you to buy and sell blocks to optimize your set. The programming side of things was definitely a bit harder than the breakout clone, but where I really spent more time was the graphics. I probably put as much time into making the intro screen and the shop screen as into the programming. Fortunately, a fellow konger who goes by zoranac offered to help out with the music. He's been churning out all kinds of music in the Kongregate colabs.

As usual, I've put the game up on Kongregate and set it up to hook into their high scores api so your achievements will get recorded.
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A bug with for…in vs for

This is possibly the weirdest bug I've ever seen. My flash program was working fine from within the debugger and from Adobe's swf player built into Flash CS5. However, when I put the swf into a web page, I got errors from things not being deleted.

How I make sure everything is deleted

Basically, I've borrowed what I'm sure is a common method of keeping track of objects from the Kongregate tutorials. Whenever I create a sprite or a text object or whatever, I push the object to a list that's a class variable. Then when the objects need to be destroyed, it's easy to go through the list and find them all. One example of this was in my side-scrolling space ship shooter game. Every time the ship fired a bullet, the bullet sprite would get added to the screen and the bullet would be added to a list. When the main ship got destroyed, then a function would be called to go through the list of bullets and remove them from the screen, turn off their event listeners, etc...

The code that caused the weird bug (only on some platforms):

function destroy() {
	for (var i in components){
		components[i].destroy();
		delete components[i];
	}
	removeEventListener("enterFrame", enterFrame);
	if (this.parent && this.parent == stage) stage.removeChild(this);
}

The code that works everywhere:

	
function destroy() {
	for (var i = 0; i < components.length; i++){
		components[i].destroy();
		delete components[i];
	}
	removeEventListener("enterFrame", enterFrame);
	if (this.parent && this.parent == stage) stage.removeChild(this);
}

Huh? How the heck is one different from the other?

Making a shop background

Making a shop background has been difficult for me. First of all, I lack the drawing skills. Given an hour or so, I can do a decent job at realistic sketches, but comic-style drawing is what matters for games. After many, many false starts, I got a mediocre shop sketch done. I put a (hopefully) greedy-looking pig merchant in the front, a bookcase with blocks in the back and various low-tech shop stuff in the background. After taking a picture of my drawing with a digital camera and uploading it to my computer I went to Aviary, a web-based art-suite. It's not as powerful as Photoshop, but it's no slouch and it doesn't cost hundreds of dollars, either. I used the vector app to create polygon-based shapes on top of my sketch. Here's what it looked like part way through:

After finishing, then I saved the file as a png, and opened it with Paint.net to do the coloring and the details that had to be drawn. This process took me forever. Part of the problem is that I was using a mouse instead of a tablet, but I think most of it was just various rookie errors. Never resize stuff before using the paintbucket tool. The shapes will leak! Also, There were some serious perspective errors. Erasing and re-drawing huge chunks of picture really sucked. Next time, I'll try a lot harder to get it right with the vector based shapes at the beginning. I'm not completely proud of the final project, but I think it's better for my learning to just finish it and then be able to work on the next project sooner.