December 19, 2012

12/19/2012

I recieved my first set of reviews for Short Circuit recently, and have since pulled the game back out of the review process in order to fix the issues. Here’s a small list of what was found:

1. Title Safe Region – Games built for the XBox and virtually any other console essentially have two different display sizes. There’s the full screen dimensions, then there’s something called the Title Safe Region. The title safe region is slightly smaller than the actual size of the displayed screen because some televisions have curved sides that would cause anything outside the title safe region to fall off the edge of the screen. It was brought to my attention that some of the text in the game falls out of this region. As such, I will have to go through all the code changing all visual positionings to be within the title safe region.
2. Trial Mode – In order for the game to sell, I have to add a means by which to make the player want to purchase the game. Obviously if they have access to playing every level in the trial version, the player isn’t likely to pay for the full version that offers the same thing. Thankfully, the XBox developer community has pointed me in the right direction to make it possible to limit the levels that are available in the trial version. Aside from writing the code, my next biggest hurdle will be selecting what levels to allow in the trial version.
3. Instructions – Some of the reviewers complained that they didn’t understand what to do when they first started playing. For some reason, I thought the first few levels made that obvious, but I was wrong. So I’ll have to add in some sort of tutorial or instruction page to teach the player how to play.
4. Hints – This one’s a doosie, and I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to figure it out. Essentially the reviewer asked for me to add some means of obtaining hints about the next move. While I like this idea myself, the problem is figuring out the algorithm that would be needed to determine what the next move should be. Once I’ve figured out that part the next question is, how many hints should the player be allowed? At this point, I’m thinking that if I am able to get the hint system working, that I should give the player 2 hints to start with and let them earn an additional hint for every three levels completed under par.
5. Crash Cases – Aparently on the XBox there are certain conditions under which a game will invariably crash and I’m supposed to be handling it. In this case the reviewer pressed on the guide button on thier controller when the game was asking them to select a hard-drive for saving and loading. I’m under the impression that this can be fixed easilly by adding some error handling code in those affected areas, but just to be sure I’m going to add error handling code everywhere in the game.

That’s all the feedback I’ve gotten from the reviews, but that isn’t the end of my todo list. I’ve actually noted an issue myself that I plan to fix. When I initially built the custom error handler, I was developing the game for Windows. I had it coded so that you could clear the list of errors by pressing F12 on the keyboard. Obviously the XBox doesn’t have that button, so I have to provide a different method. Since I’m going to be adding error handling in virtually every piece of code in the game, I can be fairly assured that the game won’t crash, meaning the player can still navigate around the game even after a fatal error. This is good, because I plan actually doing two things with error messages. First, I’m going to display a short message on screen that essentially says an error has occurred. This message will fade out over time. Secondly, I’m going to add a new screen to the game that is designed explicitely for displaying all the error messages that have occured. This screen will not be accesible unless an error has occurred, and will then be accessible from the main menu. This screen will be a scrollable screen allowing the user to scroll through all the error messages regardless of how many there were. This screen will also provide functionality for exiting the screen and clearing the error list.

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