Word of introduction
So it is. Edi is out. After a month of hard work, yelling and energy drinks, it’s finally out. And as two weeks has passed from the premiere, it’s time to look back at him and recap all the rights and wrongs during this project. Sure, I take in account that this is our first project in the TR team, more it is our first project in Corona, my first encounter with lua and much more. Therefore maybe some indulgent, would be sensible, but hell no! Recapping, and pointing every little thing is the way that we can get better and better (No wonder that people find me bloody-minded).
Management
So, as a word of introduction, Edi is my first project done a little bit more seriously, but without a boss. Oh yeah, this time I was the boss, an absolute ruler, and the master of disaster - in short - a pain in the a**. And as so, I can tell only one thing, PRAISE TRELLO! It doesn’t matter if you work with your team only over the internet, or you work desk to desk (our case). Progress tracking is crucial. At first,we ware like, yeah, sure, we can discuss everything every morning during breakfast, and… bullsh*t. Non stop asking about the progress, and vocally assigning priority for different things was a nightmare, and it slow down the work, a lot. We got confused all the time, and everything was falling apart. So I created a trello board for us, and after a month, two things emerged. First, you can track progress of project easily, knowing where you fall behind and were are you up to time, and second, far more important in my opinion, trello gave us a sense of accomplishment, as more and more cards went from „Doing” to „Done”. Sure we did a build every day from the very start, but not everything is visible this way, so this little thing was great in telling us „Yeah! We move forward!”.
Lesson learned: ”No mater what is your excuse to not use any tracking thingy, do it! It doesn’t matter how small is the team or project!”
Game itself
Bravo us! We made a game, with interface stuck in 1996! Why? Eh, it’s as static and as stiff as it can only be. Yea, ok, we put thought in buttons placement and so long, even more, we made a prototype. Click it through and I was happy as it felt and where everything was. Then I implemented it, just one to one from the prototype and left it. WRONG! There is no feedback from the game, no transitional animations, it feels more or less like a power point presentation. Haven’t we seen it during the development process? Hmm, the GUI graphics was done in the last week, and as the deadline was strict (even that it was set by me), it was too late to do something. We added a button scaling last minute (to give them that „pressed” feeling) and it helped a little but I cloud have been done a lot better. There is also another thing that made this hard to fix. As we picked that hand draw graphic feeling, and it was actually done by hand, it took A LOT of time, so adding some not „code made” animation was out of the question. But now excuses. It should have been planned from the very beginning.
Lesson learned:”No UI feedback, no fun!”
Do you know that in Edi you can get stars for accomplishment in challenges? 4 out of 5 people did not get that. Yes, there are holes under mini games pictures, but as I found out that is not clear enough. Even more, I took for granted, that people instinctively know, that if the get all of them, something good will happen. No, they don’t. So shame on me, that was a bad decision, it should have been shown. For example, by locking gallery and showing a prompt that you can see it only with enough of stars. Absolutely not by adding it to the menu out of the blue. And also, lowering the high score for the first star, and explicitly showing the player that he got one would be a good idea.
But wait, there is more. Because we have a problem, ”is that enough of motivation, for the player to come back?”. And after watching kids for some time, I can say one thing – no. Gallery? Srsly? Is Edi an old school fighting game? Nop! Kids want to dress the turtle, buy him an outfit of a cucumber („Only 200 more levels and I can buy my Pou a bee costume” – 10 years old girl), interact with him, and have a sense of progress. And that’s totally fine, cause with not so engaging, not so innovative gameplay, there must be something else to make kids (housewifes?) come back.
Lesson learned:”Bloody hell, this is not Mincraft, gave that poor player a purpose”
Yes, the lack of instructions, was by design. I don’t see a point in showing the player, what to do and how to do it, discovering it is part of the fun. But there is one mini game where I over done it. Yes, I’m talking about you, throwing-minigame (key knock -off). How the player should know that he has to press and drag the ball? I took for granted that this is Angry Birds mechanic, and it’s self explanatory for mobile players. But this time is just done badly. And when I mean badly I mean really horrible. Where is some indicator of the force and direction? No where. Maybe there is at last an arrow pointing at the ball? Nop. No feedback, not even a little. Just wrong. And why I haven’t done anything with that? I thought it will work out somehow.
Lesson learned:”Don’t be a lazy maggot, it’s not going to work out somehow”
In all Edi Mini games, you have to do something before the time runs out. Yes? No… I learn the player through first 4 mini games that rule and then I break it with bug-dodging mini game. Now the player has to survive until the time runs out. And that lack of consistency bugs me a lot. How cloud we have avoided it? Designing a different mini game. Just like that. Bad, bad design.
Lesson learned:”Be consistent, just like that!”
Back button functionality. Nothing less nothing more. I was going to add it at the end of implementation, and as I found out I would have to redo all 9 mini games, to make it work as I wanted. So no, no pause, juts app closing itself. Sure, we were new to Corona and all but for the love of God. That is the worst thing ever.
Lesson learned:”Don’t be a lazy maggot, again! Think before you code”
Other
So, is that all that went wrong? Neh, not exactly, art style we picked was a shoot in the foot. Animating was a horror because of that (for one artist). Ad placement? Not so bad, but it would be great, if I checked if we can even sell our game, before I designed the ad placement and removal system. And as I found out, in my country it’s not so easy to sell a game (taxes issues), so I have to stick with ads and think about them from the very beginning.
Summary
So, after this long self bashing, am I happy with Edi? Yes and no. The good part is that, we finished it in one month. We made it more or less enjoyable, and the turtle is cute. The bad things are all of those design mistakes I mentioned before, but I hope that, we have made them so we will never make them again. Sure, some of them will get fixed. Some of them want, as there is only one more big update coming for Edi. But after all I’m happy that we made it, we learned a lot, and grabbed another bit of experience.Thank you for reading, and see you next week, with more gibberish.Space.. Wait, what?
