So it’s almost been 4 months since Spectrangle360 went on to the Xbox Live indie marketplace and the first update for Spectrangle360 has finally passed the review process.
Why do an update?
I have asked this question to myself several times and haven’t come up with a good answer, the best answer I have is that personal pride made me do it. If I was doing this for the money I would certainly not sell enough versions of Spectrangle360 to make up for the number of hours I have ploughed into this game.
The problem
Basically Spectrangle360 worked, it worked very well if I do say so myself having been the first indie game I have ever released. But there was some very annoying issues being seen when playing Spectrangle360 over Xbox Live in the wild. Now most indie games don’t include multiplayer over Xbox Live and they don’t include it for 1 reason... complexity. Now I am not using this as an excuse, developing an Xbox Live game on your own and being able to test all online scenarios is almost an impossible task. This meant on the release of Spectrangle360 people had synchronization problems and disconnection problems which meant playing online was basically pointless.
Update Fixes
My first mission was to remove these synchronization issues from the game and to also fix some other small problems on the way if given time. Well after 4 months I think I have achieved this goal. Here is a list if the issues the update hopes to fix.
- Multiplayer synchronization issues when playing and rotating pieces.
- Adding a new score board to record and display online games vs humans.
- Added "Invites" to allow people to invite their friends and join peoples lobbies.
- Pausing whilst playing online.
- Improving the score screen to allow players to compare stats against cpu and humans.
- Being able to change the music straight away. (Still need to get more tracks)
- Improving the credits screen "QR-code" to allow people to navigate to our website easier (hoping for some more player feedback).
I am hoping these changes both restore my reputation on the indie scene plus I am hoping a lot more people play the game online now. Most of all I can rest happy knowing these I managed to fix these issues all the while dealing with everyday life (maybe more on this some time). I am also thinking about setting up some sort of league to play online but I guess I would only do this if I know people read this blog and participated, it would be good to play some the 200+ people that have purchased the game.
I guess we will see what happens...
Jase
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