Importance of Group Playtest for Game/App Development - General Marketing & SEO

Digital Eclairs went to Pinewood's after school program called AppLab, focused on getting kids more hands on on new electronics coming up.
We presented our project XnO, with multiple handled devices to kids (age group 8-12). After the first 15 mins of hands on experience, they were really enjoying the gameplay, comparing it to different games titles and how it was better, why they liked 3D, asking questions on when the app would be released, and they were very interested in knowing about the process of how it was created.
It showed us that 3D environments were a welcome change, kids respond well to warm colors we used. We set each kid on a different level and they seemed comfortable playing and getting familiar with the app. Some kids responded very well with the higher levels and some not so well because we had not ramped them through the initial gameplay, but after a few tries they started to get the hang of the game and when they were able to win they were really happy. In retrospect we realized that this was a bit of a difficult learning curve for someone new coming to this game, but with the release upon us we had to move forward with what he had. In order to give people a taste of the game on the iOS we released with a showcase of 5 levels, which looking back on it now, care is needed when choosing the level of difficulty to the casual gamer.
The Accelerometer presented an interesting challenge to the kids, once they figured out they could lift the device and tilt it left and right to move the character they were able to pick up on it quick and continue with how they had been completing the levels previously. We were short few devices and a few kids had to share the same device. The ones who were collaborating did very well on higher levels taking turns and really engaging in the game and helping each other and were faster in adapting to the game. This helped us understand that putting out a physics puzzled based game would definitely require a walkthrough to help the community through some of those tough levels.
As a developer with our first game a week away from release, it was an exhilarating experience to see our product being enjoyed by these kids. Their eagerness to explore all the game features gave us so much satisfaction and all the pain and efforts in building this game were totally worth it. The kids were very interested in knowing the process of how the game was made and when they were asked for feedback they all jumped in saying: They loved double headed turtle and wanted a three headed turtle, in-game currency that they can use to buy in things in game like weapons, wallpaper, and many more suggestions.
To anyone who want to make their own game, arrange group play tests ahead of time once you have a working build. You will get wonderful insight into your game. We had initially done a lot a individual testing from industry people, which is very useful and should not be ignored but for a complete overview on a game and end user perspective go for group tests, as individual test can sometimes be misleading. And do it as soon and as often as possible.
Digital Eclairs, is an independent game development studio. XnO - 3D Adventure Game is launch on iTunes and Google Play.

Related

Creatonia, the best Pocket PC RPG is now freeware!

The world Creatonia is populated with various creatures that may be friendly or hostile, that may be alike or different. But all the wars and feuds stop for the period of the Great Gods Uprising Tournament, and warriors from the very far parts of the world come to tourney.
Your sacred dream was to win this competition, and you manage it. But how can one live with a dream that has already come true? What is the next step? You’re getting terribly depressed after all that euphory. And one day, being in a bad temper, you tell your old Master that you’ve excelled him and have nothing to strain after. He gives you a sly smile and claimes you might be possibly right saying you’re a better fighter but you’re nothing as a teacher. In the heat of the moment you declare you’ve learned all the secrets of the fighting art, and are able to make a new champion out of the least experienced warrior by the next tournament. So, unexpectedly you’ve got a new aim of you life.
There are plenty warriors eager to take lessons from a great master. Those naive newcomers somehow are sure that to be an excellent fighter and a good teacher is the same thing. However, according to the bet conditions, you may teach just one fighter. But your choice isn’t restricted with some requirements - you may take a warrior of any race or specialization, of any starting characteristics (but it only can be a novice), so the whole thing starts with picking up a character to teach.
Game features:
- More than 150 world areas.
- 28 apprentices (exclusive characteristics + unique story of life).
- 100 characters.
- More than 400 types of items.
- More than 150 various skills.
- 13 races.
- 13 classes (specialities).
Found this on:
http://www.freewareppc.com/games/creatonia.shtml

New Touchpro2 Tims Quest Game

Tims Key Quest windows mobile WVGA game. Play as Tim on a quest to defeat the IceKing and restore life to the Land. Collect keys that open up Portals to new levels. Some levels your trapped in a room and have to collect the, then a portal will open up to next level. Some levels are platform action levels where you go left to right until you reach the portal avoiding enemies along the way. Then you have boss levels where sometimes you use weapons or stomp the boss on the head.
The full version is only 99 cents here
http://www.mobihand.com/product.asp?id=66920&n=Tims-Key-Quest
feedback
Can I get some feedback from anyone who has played the game?
Hey it's pretty neat. Would like to see hardware keyboard support though, I never liked playing games solely on the touch screen . Or maybe it could be both keyboard and touch screen ;o?
Lol well it seems fun, like a cute mario sort of game. It'd keep me busy for a while .
thanks
Ok thanks for the feedback , glad you enjoyed it. I made a jump left and jump right button so it will be smooth like multi-touch.
Yeah and it's nice ;p. Just sucks that ours doesn't have real multi-touch .
But keep up the work!
feedback
Thanks alot for the feedback....Iam glad you enjoyed it.

Emulators vs Modern games i.e zombies ,Ngrybirds

Are ? /surely modern games are better ,than the emulator ones ,that evry1 says to download ?
Depends what you enjoy i guess.
The Snes/Genesis era was fluctuated with an amazing amount of high quality platform games.
Try finding a modern day platform game that is better than Sonic the Hedgehog 1 for example.
Todays platform games are mostly shallow experiences compared to older games.
Older games were simply sold as any other toy, so they had to make the best out of your playing experience in order to make you a repeat customer. That involved using more thought out and complex game mechanics, longer play times and more engaging stories and characters, all allowed by the growing processing power of consoles.
Eventually multimillion dollar teams had to be used for those tasks, which made games not profitable. The adoption of distribution means originally used by pirates (aka the internet) and the huge success of the Wii with the casual gaming population allowed companies to cut costs on both distribution and production: casual gamers demand simple addictive games and they're more ready to fork out cash, so you can both cut the videogame store middleman by distributing on the internet and you can cut production costs because you need less cost intensive games.
Right now the game scene resembles a lot the commercial films scene: it's a dual environment with both independent low cost games whose success is a lottery and big budget games which have more or less a planned demand.
I enjoy emulating SNES and PSX a lot more than modern games. I just think those older games are much much more fun to play. And I really love pixel graphics. I have a PS3 at home which is pretty much unused as I emulate on the phone all of the time.
I play mostly RPG's. They story telling in them can't be matched in todays games in my opinion and the older graphics leaves much for my own imagination of things. I can relate more to older games and the feelings they are trying to convey.
spyro,crash,banjo , medievil , mvc , mk, metal slug, pokemon , zelda ,mario , donkey kong , star fox ,ff are simply too amazing!!! You just cant compare these masterpieces to modern games on Phone!
BUT! i still enjoy both the XPERIA games and the classic games ,and i think i play phone games more than classic games they are differenet , so it depends on how you view them. I bought my phone to play emulators , but the phone games had more quality than i expected, and ending up loving them aswell..
Both are good but emu is best. Most new games dont hold a candle to some older ones in terms of gameplay
You can't go wrong with emulators, some of the best games of all time came out in the 90's (Chrono Trigger, Earth Bound, FFVII VII IX, Mega Man X, Chrono Cross, Suikoden, Crash Bandicoot, Metal Gear Solid, Twisted metal, etc.) Not only that, the roms/emulators for SNES, Genesis, NES, and Gameboy Advanced take up FAR less memory than a modern game. The PS1 games are pretty big files (ranging from 300mb to 800mb per disc), but they're usually long amazing games so it's well worth the memory usage.
Iuno if I'll piss the above replies off with my response... but my days of being nostalgia drunken aren't as potent as they used to be.
Nowadays, I'm coming closer to a time where I absolutely can't stand a lot of the games I grew up on.
I hear a lot of people inferring that challenge is a thing that no longer exists in today's game... but once you remove the nostalgia shades, you see that older games weren't harder, they were just full of technical flaws, poor algorithms, outdated control schemes, laughable physics and archaic collision detection that made a game harder than it needs to be.
With that said, I have pretty much all the good emulators on my Xperia PLAY... and they barely ever get used. There's no way in hell I can go back to playing a game like Doom when I've got Dead Space on my Xperia PLAY. Street Fighter 2 seems like an imbalanced trainwreck of a game now, Final Fantasy's magic system was illogical, the jumping physics in a lot of the platformers makes no sense.
Iuno... I still gotta have my Kirby's Adventure and some of the old-school RPGs... but for the most part,I just don't really care to play some outmoded game that suffers from outdated control schemes, and must be stretched and distorted when I can get something newer that makes use of my Xperia PLAY's big, beautiful 854x480 screen.
Take FPS for example... I have some of my fondest childhood memories of putting SNES FPS on the hardest setting and giving my all to make it through. It was a rush and I loved it... back in the day. Play them nowadays, and first thing you recall is
"OMFG, did we really use L/R to strafe back then?"
"Okay... so if R is strafe, how the **** did I shoot? ...oh... the X button... dis-a-point-ING."
"...wait... so I had to use a different button to aim on more than one axis?! WHAT IS THIS I DONT EVEN"
I recently also tried to play Killer Instinct and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (the SNES one, of course) because I remember liking those as a kid too... oh my God... the collision detection was half retarded, and I quickly made that link to figure out balance in fighting games didn't really come 'til the late PlayStation/Dreamcast days.
Newer games like Cordy, Meganoid, INC, Stardash and Pixeline may not have franchise and nostalgia backing it... but they *work* a lot better than old school platformers do.
Same goes for pretty much every genre except RPG... and especially shooters/racers/sports/fighters. Try going back a couple generations in shooters/racers/sports/fighters and you'll be in tears, screaming "Why is this so BAD?!"
People tout the Xperia PLAY is the absolute best option for emulation... but honestly, I'd rather play games that are either made specifically for the Xperia PLAY, or optimized to work with it.
Nothing wrong with old school... but on a general note, a lot of people need to differentiate between genuine goodness, and notice when nostalgia's blinding them from seeing when a game is a pre-mature aberration.
You've given it away: RPG's and adventures, the kind of games one actually may want to play again because they have a plot and can be rediscovered, are still unchallenged. The rest of genres have been either dumbed down where they're not a challenge anymore (Survival Horror games as the most conspicuous example, compare Resident Evil and Silent Hill with Resident Evil 5), or mainly figured out in terms of control, or both (FPS, compare the complex dungeons in Quake vs. the cutscene-laden FPS of today)... but not in the Xperia Play. Compare Battlefield 2 and Minecraft in terms of control and then roll a die to see if you cry, and if so, how hard.
Maybe Street Fighter 2 Turbo is unbalanced and has retarded physics, but people know most characters of its roster. The same cannot be said for games like Bruce Lee.
Maybe Final Fantasy 7 or 8 have ridiculous animations and they are childish to no end, but they say something to people, unlike Eternal Legacy.
Logseman said:
"... but not in the Xperia Play."
"...they say something to people, unlike Eternal Legacy."
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol, I agree with some things you've said, but let's be honest... it's a low blow (nearing straw man logical fallacy) to use Gameloft's incompetence to evaluate this generation of gaming - even if we're being specific enough to only consider the Xperia PLAY. Not to say you gotta be like me, but I at least used games that were prime at the time because it just make one's own point less respectable if all they can attack are weak opponents.
Gameloft has made some horrid controls (and even more horrid storylines), but the Xperia PLAY's game library has much more than Gameloft.
Dead Space; for example, not only created a standard of perfection for touch-pad controls, but it brought handheld dual-analog gaming to a reality it wouldn't have reached until the Vita was released next year... and with additional OS functions the Vita will likely NEVER have. Mainstream handhelds have consistently been weak with MMORPGs, Xperia PLAY's already got a handful of them... which work over 3G. What the Xperia PLAY's accomplished is very amazing when viewed from that standpoint.
The only thing that's come close to that was the Pandora, and it didn't do it near as well.
..and while Eternal Legacy's storyline hit mediocrity quite often (I'll admit, that forced kiss scene on the mountains almost made me rage) Eternal Legacy is not the cream of the crop. For example, get into Spectral Souls and you'll catch something that has a gameplay system easily able to take on Disgaea, and a storyline that truly develops into something substantial.
EDIT: BTW, i get a error when trying to view the image you posted.
YET ANOTHER EDIT: Even though I cited RPGs as the one genre that I can credit the old school for... removing the nostalgia glasses kinda takes them off the pedestal too. Newer RPGs have better overall design, less generic dungeon structure, characters with vastly better development, battle systems are more variant and allow more options/growth, conversations are more interesting, conversations are to a point in which you get involved input that will change the tide of things, storylines have much more impact, atmosphere actually has a passionate craft behind it... it's not just a "GRAFIX WHORE!" thing... games just improved over time, regardless of the genre.
Honestly, the only thing I really miss how "melodic" music used to be in games, as opposed to that wannabe-theatric bull**** they have now. And I'd even go as far as to admit that's a bias on my behalf too, since what I labeled as "wannabe-theatric bull****" actually has a far greater sense of orchestral composure behind it.
...luckily, KEMCO has been on a non-stop RPG churning spree for people just like me who want old-school-style RPGs on Android without them actually being the games I've already played ages ago.
It is not a strawman to compare successful games by successful companies. Whether we like it or not, Gameloft is the most successful videogame company of our days. Besides, EA hasn't published any RPG's on the Play (not that I'd mind snatching some Dragon Age goodness...) and the only offers are Gamevil's and Kemco's which appear to be made with RPGMaker.
The Xperia Play means undoubtedly a breakthrough, even if it's been mostly a commercial flop (let's assume it, it was marketed wrongly and it was too expensive at first). People pay cash for its games quite gladly, unlike most other Android handsets where people buy more ad-supported games or pirate them. It hosts some good games, and it's proven that touch screen gaming can not substitute for buttons and sticks.
However, it lacks device-sellers, or games which make a dent on the public. Right now it has a price where bundling it with a game could drive further sales, but it's really hard to find a device-seller like what FFVII did for the PSX. Spectral Souls is nice, but it didn't hit in the PSP where it came from, so it's hard to imagine it would do on the Play, particularly with its high price.
A game I'd LOVE to see ported is Battle for Wesnoth. It's a turn-based strategy game, probably the flagship of open-source games, and it has an iPhone port... but no Android one.
Logseman said:
It is not a strawman to compare successful games by successful companies. Whether we like it or not, Gameloft is the most successful videogame company of our days.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gameloft certainly has been successful, but I don't know how much weight I'd put in that since their success relies on using low prices to dodge the flak they'd catch for so many poorly-tested low-quality releases. Comparing their 'kind' of success to something like Sonic the Hedgehog just isn't level to me.
When I said your comment was near being a straw-man, it's because we - the Xperia PLAY gamers - have already witnessed Gameloft incompetence, know they consistently screw things up... and we know not to expect much out of them. Why attack such an easy target? If you wanna make a point, it'd be much more effective to attack games of higher accomplishments.
I'll agree with the part about device sellers. Or at least half-agree... there's definitely games on Xperia PLAY that make it worth the purchase, but they aren't being marketed very well. Like you said, it's commercial success isn't quite where it should be...shame, because the Kristen Schaal ads were quite amazing (easily better than what Sony used for PS3/PSP) and they could've definitely pushed some units if they were aired in America. As far as I know though, Xperia PLAY only got a half-assed mention at a superbowl commercial a year back, and again in a back to school Verizon ad.
Another thing worth mentioning on that note is that things were also made quite a bit complicated when it comes to buying new Xperia PLAY games. Gameloft and EA's games, in particular, revolve around completely separate app stores and there's even some stuff that's inaccessible unless you're on the Rogers/Fido network. Not quite a big burden, but still one nonetheless.
Spectral Souls did flop on PSP, but it was also marred with issues that made it unplayable... issues that have been resolved in the Android version. At the same time though, that's still on it's reputation.
A game I'd LOVE to see ported is Battle for Wesnoth. It's a turn-based strategy game, probably the flagship of open-source games, and it has an iPhone port... but no Android one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hm? I could've sworn Battle for Wesnoth was on Android. Did you mean to say you wished there was an Xperia PLAY Optimzed version?
Yep... Wesnoth is definitely on Droid.
TLRtheory said:
Iuno if I'll piss the above replies off with my response... but my days of being nostalgia drunken aren't as potent as they used to be.
Nowadays, I'm coming closer to a time where I absolutely can't stand a lot of the games I grew up on.
I hear a lot of people inferring that challenge is a thing that no longer exists in today's game... but once you remove the nostalgia shades, you see that older games weren't harder, they were just full of technical flaws, poor algorithms, outdated control schemes, laughable physics and archaic collision detection that made a game harder than it needs to be.
With that said, I have pretty much all the good emulators on my Xperia PLAY... and they barely ever get used. There's no way in hell I can go back to playing a game like Doom when I've got Dead Space on my Xperia PLAY. Street Fighter 2 seems like an imbalanced trainwreck of a game now, Final Fantasy's magic system was illogical, the jumping physics in a lot of the platformers makes no sense.
Iuno... I still gotta have my Kirby's Adventure and some of the old-school RPGs... but for the most part,I just don't really care to play some outmoded game that suffers from outdated control schemes, and must be stretched and distorted when I can get something newer that makes use of my Xperia PLAY's big, beautiful 854x480 screen.
Take FPS for example... I have some of my fondest childhood memories of putting SNES FPS on the hardest setting and giving my all to make it through. It was a rush and I loved it... back in the day. Play them nowadays, and first thing you recall is
"OMFG, did we really use L/R to strafe back then?"
"Okay... so if R is strafe, how the **** did I shoot? ...oh... the X button... dis-a-point-ING."
"...wait... so I had to use a different button to aim on more than one axis?! WHAT IS THIS I DONT EVEN"
I recently also tried to play Killer Instinct and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (the SNES one, of course) because I remember liking those as a kid too... oh my God... the collision detection was half retarded, and I quickly made that link to figure out balance in fighting games didn't really come 'til the late PlayStation/Dreamcast days.
Newer games like Cordy, Meganoid, INC, Stardash and Pixeline may not have franchise and nostalgia backing it... but they *work* a lot better than old school platformers do.
Same goes for pretty much every genre except RPG... and especially shooters/racers/sports/fighters. Try going back a couple generations in shooters/racers/sports/fighters and you'll be in tears, screaming "Why is this so BAD?!"
People tout the Xperia PLAY is the absolute best option for emulation... but honestly, I'd rather play games that are either made specifically for the Xperia PLAY, or optimized to work with it.
Nothing wrong with old school... but on a general note, a lot of people need to differentiate between genuine goodness, and notice when nostalgia's blinding them from seeing when a game is a pre-mature aberration.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
QFT. I found myself when we discovered PSXperia I emulated a few games, played them for a week, and then went back to the new games I had. I tried to play through Crash Bandicoot again and found it needlessly frustrating. And in the past I've emulated on my computer everything from old arcade games I played through Genesis games and more. Every time I found myself playing for a few hours and then forgetting about it.
Not sure if it was just because it was a different time, a different place, or our expectations have just been pushed so high its hard to go back down. I could echo everything you say about bugs, and hit detection etc.
I think the other thing is, we (or at least I), don't have the time to sit down and play for long cycles like many of these games require. The Xperia Emulator partially helps this with the built in save feature but still not all emulators have that. Much of my game playing on my Xplay these days is at around midnight for a half hour or so before I go to sleep (which makes Dead Space even more awesome).
TLRtheory said:
Gameloft certainly has been successful, but I don't know how much weight I'd put in that since their success relies on using low prices to dodge the flak they'd catch for so many poorly-tested low-quality releases. Comparing their 'kind' of success to something like Sonic the Hedgehog just isn't level to me.
.....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Regarding Gameloft, I think I put up with a lot more with them for the fact I haven't paid more than a buck for any game of theirs that I own. If I paid $50 for their games I would have likely burned down their offices by now. That said if you look at some games from the past they were almost as buggy (especially PC games but at least those could be updated!) and we DID pay $50 for them and liked it. I still have sitting in a storage box a copy of Battlecruiser 3000AD, if you want to see a buggy game look that one up, it was actually unplayable out of the box!
The port was published in September. I didn't have news of it... At any rate, AWWWW YEAHHHHHH!!!
While I agree with some of what you and Rogue Leader are saying about certain games being out dated and whatnot, there were a ton of older games, especially renowned RPG's, that I missed in my youth. The fact that I get to finally play them **on my phone** whenever and wherever I want, AND with a game pad, is pretty astounding to me.
Yeah, some classic games show their age, but there are many gems out there that most the new games can't touch. Super mario series, Final fantasy series, Zelda series..the new games just lack the level designs, the perfect level of polish, and the emotion of these games. I dunno, maybe developers just tried harder then because these games originally sold for upwards of $70, rather than upwards of $7
However, one new game series has seemed to have captured the magic of the past, the Bit Trip series. I would kill to have Runner on my phone, but I know it will never happen.

[APP] Jumba is back in stunning HD graphics!

Just decided to share - legendary 5-in-a-row Jumba from Windows Mobile, one of the best and beautiful games for WM is now on Android for free!
Jumba is an exciting puzzle game. Its gameplay is easy to learn but hard to master which makes it extremely addictive.
The game features high resolution graphics and a relaxing soundtrack. You can also share your highscores with thousands of other players in a world wide challenge. Of course without registration.
The idea of the game:
Your goal is to create lines of 5 balls or more to make them vanish. By creating multple lines without wasting a move in between you can increase your score. Bonus items like jokers and multiplier-boxes will help you to achieve even greater highscores.
Grab it here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...251bGwsMSwxLDEsImRlLmZ1bjRtb2JpbGUuanVtYmEiXQ
What's your opinion on the game? In my opinion there should be some additional modes like classic lines or time attack mode... I could not end a single game - seems to be rather easy.
But still very relaxing and beautiful

How-To White-Box a Game (Making of XnO Part II)

No story is complete without its origins. We love to share with you the very first white-box environment of XnO!
XnO began its origins from the name "Ice Breakers", the way the cylindrical blocks were breaking. We had 3 walls couple of boxes from unity asset packages. And began the journey. We wanted to take a simple idea and implement in it all the possible depths.
When we began majority of the games were 2D or side scrollers, that never gave the player full satisfaction of real life interaction with physics of the objects. So we chose a 3D engine, as to why "unity" - the amount of tutorials, community support and ease of start was a key factor in choosing that engine.
To be a team you would need atleast 3 components to begin with - programmer, 2D/3D artist and level designer. Not to say one person can handle more than one aspect. As a team we were all on the same page, we want to make a physics based game with focus on gameplay first.
We followed the following steps:
i) Create first level - We used very basic components - rectangle, sphere, cylinder to create a game play scenario.
ii) Create a flow through of the game - Main Menu, Options and Level Select Screens. Once this was done adding new levels was very easy.
iii) In Game HUD - To enter and exit from any level
iv) Uploaded a web version for our friends/family to play.
Once we had all the pieces then we focussed on exploring all the possible depths and variations in the gameplay that can be achieved to make the game engaging and fun. In our case - target variations, introducing obstacles, power-ups, use of accelerometer to enhance gameplay. Once we had built the key features in, we explored on how to increase difficulty of the levels as the game progressed. At this stage we made some of our models, used some from unity and still used royalty free music.
Once we had good 20 levels working with all the above, we started showing it to people who either played a lot of games or were in gaming. This gave us a good insight on how improve.
As an indie developer it was so much easier for us to do the white-box the way we did because we focussed on Gameplay and Game Design, not so much on the art in the beginning. So when we got the feedback to change, it was so much easier to do it. We were never set in stone.
XnO is our attempt at making a 3D game with as close as possible to real physics without sacrificing the gameplay and memory footprint of the game. XnO is now available on Google Play and Amazon App Store.

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