More reviews,
We got another review from @IndieGamerChick, to be honest we were quite worried about the review as in the past IndieGamerChick had found the issues relating to the multi player part of the game and she is also known for her very ... how can I say cutting remakes.
To be fair I am actually quite happy with the review, she tells it how it is, which I can safely say is better then some of the reviews I got which just moaned about the music... She also actually ranked us 83rd on here 100 leader board. Anyway here is the link.
Showing posts with label Spectrangle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spectrangle. Show all posts
First update
Spectrangle360 - Update 1
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.
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
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
1 Week on #XBLIG ....WOW
So,
Its been over a week of being on Xbox360's indie Xbox Live channel and man its been busy. Busy? what do you mean busy? I hear you say, well if you want to get some decent sales on Xbox Live the first few weeks are the most important I feel. You really have to try hard to get your game known as much as possible before the game slips down into the recent published list. So to get my name and Spectrangle360 out there I have been emailing and tweeting/retweeting as much as possible, below is a list of hopefully all the reviews I have managed to get so far. Most of the them think that Spectrangle360 is a good game but limited to the board game enthusiast, which to be honest I was expecting any way here's the list. Hope I didn't miss any and if I did...sorry:-
To those that helped me with these reviews I want to say thanks, I specially want to thank @DaddyPigGames and @MayContainGeeks you should look these guys up on twitter there great :).
So whats next, well I plan to do an update to Spectrangle360 from the things I am not happy with myself and a few issues but more on that in another post. I hope to keep Spectrangle360 in the lime light as it where for as long as possible and just build on what I have already done so far.
And if you have bought Spectrangle360 I just want to say a BIG THANKS.
Your awesome, also let me know what you think of the game and what you would like improving.
Jase
Its been over a week of being on Xbox360's indie Xbox Live channel and man its been busy. Busy? what do you mean busy? I hear you say, well if you want to get some decent sales on Xbox Live the first few weeks are the most important I feel. You really have to try hard to get your game known as much as possible before the game slips down into the recent published list. So to get my name and Spectrangle360 out there I have been emailing and tweeting/retweeting as much as possible, below is a list of hopefully all the reviews I have managed to get so far. Most of the them think that Spectrangle360 is a good game but limited to the board game enthusiast, which to be honest I was expecting any way here's the list. Hope I didn't miss any and if I did...sorry:-
http://www.thegamejar.com/2012/03/theindiejar-spectrangle-screenshots/
http://indietheory.com/review/9-xblig/68-review-akane-the-kunoichi
http://indietheory.com/review/9-xblig/68-review-akane-the-kunoichi
To those that helped me with these reviews I want to say thanks, I specially want to thank @DaddyPigGames and @MayContainGeeks you should look these guys up on twitter there great :).
So whats next, well I plan to do an update to Spectrangle360 from the things I am not happy with myself and a few issues but more on that in another post. I hope to keep Spectrangle360 in the lime light as it where for as long as possible and just build on what I have already done so far.
And if you have bought Spectrangle360 I just want to say a BIG THANKS.
Your awesome, also let me know what you think of the game and what you would like improving.
Jase
Spectrangle360 now on the marketplace
Hi,
Well for once MS have been quite responsive. When I pushed the "Publish Now" there is a warning saying it could take upto 24 hours.
So I thought that if worst came to the worst I should press the button today at around 12pm in hopes that the game will be available Friday (23/3/12).
Well the game actually published in 2 hours...this was the fastest part of the process, anyway here it is.
Offically an Xbox360 indie developer
Finally.....FINALLY I managed to get Spectrangle360 past peer review and I am now able to publish it to the Xbox indie market place.
It wasnt an easy ride by any stretch of the imagination, after entering playtest on 9/11/2011 and submitting the game 17 times and then starting the review process on 1/12/2011 and submitting 8 times I finally got the 8 passes I needed.
So whats next, well the next step is to finally press that "Publish Now" button, my initial plan is to do this on the 23/3/2012 so that the game will be available the next day (Friday) hopefully. Mean while I plan to use all the contacts that I have made over the months to get the word out about Spectrangle360 and hopefully build a little interest before the game is available.
Theres plenty of things to do, wish me luck.....
More review\playtests, new contacts & paying it forward
Well after pulling Spectrangle360 from playtest then putting it into review then pulling the game and putting it back to playtest rince and repeat at least 2 more times I now have more of a feeling how the XBLIG review\playtest process works.
The most difficult aspect of it all is to get enough people interested in your game that people will use their own time to download your game, playtest it and post comments on the thread with any issues they find. Even harder is once you think you have fixed all the issues you then have to get enough passes in order that your game passes review and then gets published to Xbox Live.
So where am I up to so far? Well after finding some more contacts and paying it forward (in other words trying to do as many playtest\reviews as possible in hopes that some people will feel obliged to return the favour). I got some quite good feedback, the main feedback was to remove the high score sharing code as this at the moment is very problematic and would take to long to fix for the first version. I have also replaced the high score sharing with an online game notification system.
So when some one starts playing Spectrangle360 online anyone else playing the game at the same time will get notified and then have the option to join the game. I will test these features as much as possible and put the game into playtest again for a week and then try and drum up some playtests.
Jase
The most difficult aspect of it all is to get enough people interested in your game that people will use their own time to download your game, playtest it and post comments on the thread with any issues they find. Even harder is once you think you have fixed all the issues you then have to get enough passes in order that your game passes review and then gets published to Xbox Live.
So where am I up to so far? Well after finding some more contacts and paying it forward (in other words trying to do as many playtest\reviews as possible in hopes that some people will feel obliged to return the favour). I got some quite good feedback, the main feedback was to remove the high score sharing code as this at the moment is very problematic and would take to long to fix for the first version. I have also replaced the high score sharing with an online game notification system.
So when some one starts playing Spectrangle360 online anyone else playing the game at the same time will get notified and then have the option to join the game. I will test these features as much as possible and put the game into playtest again for a week and then try and drum up some playtests.
Jase
Back to Playtest again
Well we managed to get a review of our game Spectrangle360 but the first review we got was a code 4 which means a complete fail. so after talking with some of the XNA community members @KrisWD40 and @MachXGames we decided to pull our game and put it back into playtest. Hopefully we can get some more feedback and review might be alot more smoother in a week or so.
Anyway here are some screen shots of the game to hopefully peek your interest.
Jase
Anyway here are some screen shots of the game to hopefully peek your interest.
Jase
Playtest results
So,
After 2 weeks of play test I managed to get some positive feedback about the game. Mostly every one seemed to think the game was interesting and fun to play. The only other miner issues that people found where:-
The piece didn't swap sides depending on what side was playing.
The ai sometimes took too long on very hard level to play its move.
And I also got reports that the numbers where too small to read.
So after 2 weeks I was hoping to get more response but for some reason (hopefully not the game) that is all I got. So what is the next step? Well I am not going to let my lack of feedback set me back. I am going to spend some time finishing the other bits of the game and then put the game into review and hopefully get some feedback this way other wise my game will be finally published.
Jase
After 2 weeks of play test I managed to get some positive feedback about the game. Mostly every one seemed to think the game was interesting and fun to play. The only other miner issues that people found where:-
The piece didn't swap sides depending on what side was playing.
The ai sometimes took too long on very hard level to play its move.
And I also got reports that the numbers where too small to read.
So after 2 weeks I was hoping to get more response but for some reason (hopefully not the game) that is all I got. So what is the next step? Well I am not going to let my lack of feedback set me back. I am going to spend some time finishing the other bits of the game and then put the game into review and hopefully get some feedback this way other wise my game will be finally published.
Jase
Playtest
Well after months and months and months of chipping away at this game + doing a triatholon and going on various holidays I have finally got the game in a state where most of the functionality can be playtested.
I still have a few things to finish off but at this point its good to get some feedback about the current game and hopefully if I can get some good feedback I can implement this into the final game too.
So I hope to post again soonish with the feedback I recieve and hopefully get the game in to the next stage which is review time.
Jase
I still have a few things to finish off but at this point its good to get some feedback about the current game and hopefully if I can get some good feedback I can implement this into the final game too.
So I hope to post again soonish with the feedback I recieve and hopefully get the game in to the next stage which is review time.
Jase
Progress....
Well its been a while since I updated this but I have finally been making progress on Spectrangle. As you can see its taken me longer then I anticipated, the reason for this is well general life things as usual finding the time to keep chipping away at Spectrangle is hard at best. With me doing my first Sprint triathlon and going away on the odd short holiday just eats up your time.
One major stumbling block was the networking, although I had pretty much figured out the API I was having difficulty with the connection just dropping for no good reason. So my first task was to refactor all the code to work the same as all the supplied Microsofts samples...thus to no avail. I then tried to analyse the data sent from the samples and after a while these showed the dropping out issue.
I finally tracked the problem down to being wireless....??? what, yes thats right my Xbox Slim is wireless and my laptop is wireless. Hard wiring these into my BT home hub instantly fixed the problem. This discovery really helped and let me get on with finishing of the network code, to a state now where you can play a full game on Xbox live...go me.
My next tasks where to re implement the AI, this wasnt much of an issue as I had already figured out the algorithms on the Silverlight version.
My task now are to finish of the AI player configuration and get all the surrounding functionality working, I dont want to put a date on it but August to September I hope to have the game play testable.
Stay tuned.
Jase
One major stumbling block was the networking, although I had pretty much figured out the API I was having difficulty with the connection just dropping for no good reason. So my first task was to refactor all the code to work the same as all the supplied Microsofts samples...thus to no avail. I then tried to analyse the data sent from the samples and after a while these showed the dropping out issue.
I finally tracked the problem down to being wireless....??? what, yes thats right my Xbox Slim is wireless and my laptop is wireless. Hard wiring these into my BT home hub instantly fixed the problem. This discovery really helped and let me get on with finishing of the network code, to a state now where you can play a full game on Xbox live...go me.
My next tasks where to re implement the AI, this wasnt much of an issue as I had already figured out the algorithms on the Silverlight version.
My task now are to finish of the AI player configuration and get all the surrounding functionality working, I dont want to put a date on it but August to September I hope to have the game play testable.
Stay tuned.
Jase
Xbox Live - Multiplayer
So I almost have multiplayer working in Spectrangle, It was nto as hard as I thought it was however I am still a little doubltful that its going to still work once actually playing over the internet.
At the moment I can almost play a full game between my development laptop and my Xbox and its actually quite cool moving and placing trangs on my laptop and having them move on the Xbox.
Once I have this fully working though, I plan to spend a lot more time polishing the game. I guess as its not a very complex game interms of features I really want it to be slick so people that play the trial game might think..wow this really is a slick game of Spectrangle I would buy that for a doller. To help me make it looking good I actually recieved some of the actual box art from the original board game by jumbo so I will definatly hope to use that some where.
Anyway if you have any thoughts on what I can do to add value to the game or any thought in general it would be nice to hear from you.
Jase
At the moment I can almost play a full game between my development laptop and my Xbox and its actually quite cool moving and placing trangs on my laptop and having them move on the Xbox.
Once I have this fully working though, I plan to spend a lot more time polishing the game. I guess as its not a very complex game interms of features I really want it to be slick so people that play the trial game might think..wow this really is a slick game of Spectrangle I would buy that for a doller. To help me make it looking good I actually recieved some of the actual box art from the original board game by jumbo so I will definatly hope to use that some where.
Anyway if you have any thoughts on what I can do to add value to the game or any thought in general it would be nice to hear from you.
Jase
Spectrangle
Spectrangle360
Well I actually started this project a while back just to see how hard it would be to develop Spectrangle for the 360 and to my suprise it was actually quite easy, once I managed to get the trangs generated and the coordinate system working which uses the analog stick to move the trangs around the board.
As I mentioned on the main page, after a number of emails between myself and Jumbo and showing them the prototype that I had developed in Silverlight, Jumbo finally agreed to let me use their IP. Currently I have the basics of the game working (Including a basic AI opponent) but here are the features I am hoping to add to the final Spectrangle360.
As you can see, due to the much better resolutions of the Xbox more detail can be added to make the Trangs look photo realistic instead of using vector images.
Well thats it for now, I have been dying to tell people what I have been up to and now I have the proper permissions I can and I hope to have Spectrangle360 available soon.
Jase
As I mentioned on the main page, after a number of emails between myself and Jumbo and showing them the prototype that I had developed in Silverlight, Jumbo finally agreed to let me use their IP. Currently I have the basics of the game working (Including a basic AI opponent) but here are the features I am hoping to add to the final Spectrangle360.
- 4 player multiplayer on the same Xbox
- 4 player network play
- Global highscores
- Different game types for Spectrangle
- And 4 AI difficulties
As you can see, due to the much better resolutions of the Xbox more detail can be added to make the Trangs look photo realistic instead of using vector images.
Well thats it for now, I have been dying to tell people what I have been up to and now I have the proper permissions I can and I hope to have Spectrangle360 available soon.
Jase
New Project....sort off
Well I have not been able to update KOTH from when I last put it in for play test on the XBLIG last year and the reason why was that I had an idea to start a different project which I already had some experience of creating.
This project was a version of "Spectrangle" published by Jumbo which I developed in Silverlight, here is a link to that game which I completed a while back.
http://www.game-of-the-gods.com/sandbox/spacerocks/clientbin/spectrangle.html
(You while need Silverlight to run this)
Anyway I got to thinking that why dont I ask the games owner Jumbo to allow me to create a version for the Xbox and maybe other platforms.
Read more on the "Spectrangle360" tab where I plan to update the page with the latest developments.
This project was a version of "Spectrangle" published by Jumbo which I developed in Silverlight, here is a link to that game which I completed a while back.
http://www.game-of-the-gods.com/sandbox/spacerocks/clientbin/spectrangle.html
(You while need Silverlight to run this)
Anyway I got to thinking that why dont I ask the games owner Jumbo to allow me to create a version for the Xbox and maybe other platforms.
Read more on the "Spectrangle360" tab where I plan to update the page with the latest developments.
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