Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category
It’s Getting Close…
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
I’m prepared to officially declare Alpha this morning!
I had an extremely productive couple of days and finished off the 2 Player Mode last night. There are still a few small things to add to the game (a few animations to spice things up in places), but all the big features are finished. At this point it’s finishing up the last of the polish items and then it’s tuning, testing, and bug fixing until submission!
My original plan was to declare Alpha by the end of December, but then I decided I had time to implement Timed Mode and 2 Player Mode. I’m really glad I spent the time to add these modes; they add so much to the game. I really feel like I’ll be able to justify the price-point I’ve been mulling over in my head (more on that later). Given that I added two game modes in the last 3 weeks I’m feeling pretty good at declaring Alpha today.
The plan now is to wrap up the last of the polish tasks and fix the bugs I’m aware of by mid next week. At that point I’ll declare Beta and send out a Beta build to everyone who has signed up for Beta Testing.
I’m still looking for more Beta Testers. If you’re interested, please send me an email (info AT streamingcolour DOT com) with “beta test” in the subject. There are full details in this previous post.
Unrelated to Dapple, I wanted to share a few links that have been sent my way over the last while:
- AppTheater (www.apptheater.com) – A site that collects videos of iPhone Apps. If you want to see what an App is like before you buy it, look for a video here.
- Oolong Engine (www.oolongengine.com) – Noel from Snappy Touch informed me about this freely available simple engine for iPhone. It looks to me like it’s based off the code from Apple’s (now removed) CrashLanding example project, but they’ve added all kinds of handy functionality. I wish I’d known about this 6 months ago…
Oh, one final note: I contacted the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission, for those outside Toronto) about advertising on buses and subways. They sent me some pricing information and I’ve realised that the old adage “you need to spend money to make money” is so true. There should perhaps be a corollary “you need money to make money”. I’ve realised I can’t afford to do that kind of physical advertising until I make some money. Ironic, ain’t it?
Owen
A Call for Beta Testers
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
I have a few things to mention this morning…
I’ve added a few links to the Contact Us page – one for my Twitter account, and one for the Streaming Colour Facebook page. I’ve also added a link to my Twitter account off the blog page in the sidebar. I post things to Twitter that are too small to warrant a full blog post. Blog post notifications are also sent to Twitter, so it’s a good way to get blog updates if you don’t use the RSS feed.
I started implementing the 2-player mode for the game yesterday. So far I’ve got all of the game state classes converted to storing state for two players and all of the calling code now passes a player id into the calls. I’ll be getting to the first big changes today, namely: layout changes. After the new layout is implemented I’ll make the actual gameplay changes.
Finally, I’m putting out a call for beta testers for Dapple. If you would like to beta test Dapple, I’ll hopefully send out a build sometime next week. Here are some details:
- You must be willing to play all of the game modes of the game fairly regularly.
- You must be willing to send me reports of any bugs/crashes you encounter (in as much detail you can provide about what you were doing, what happened, crash logs, etc).
- You should feel free to send me feedback on the difficulty of the various game modes.
- You should feel free to send my any other kind of feedback on the game.
- You will not be compensated for beta testing. (i.e. you will not be paid)
- You will not receive any kind of game credit for beta testing.
- You must have an iPhone or iPod touch that is running OS 2.1 or higher.
- You must be willing to provide me with your unique iPhone/iPod touch identifier number so that I can create an ad-hoc build that will run on your device (I will provide you with instructions on finding the number).
- You will get to play Dapple before it’s released!
If you want to get in on the beta, please email me at: “info AT streamingcolour DOT com” with “Beta Test” in the subject line before 11:59 PM EST, Sunday, January 25th, 2009. I haven’t decided how many testers I need yet, but it will probably be up to 20 or so. I’ll accept testers in the order the emails arrive.
Finally, if you’re reading this from the U.S., happy inauguration day!
Owen