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armandoharris17

Mobile Game Testing

Everything I Love About My Game

The first thing I love about my game is that I made it completely from scratch. From the art to the code (with some references, naturally) I made this game and it is pretty much what I imagined it to be. After this month of testing, balancing, and bug hunting, I was able to tweak the mechanics to feel as responsive as expected.

The voice input, for example, is a core mechanic for the game, but throughout the development, it never responded as smoothly as I would have liked. Since it was new territory for me at the beginning, accessing voice inputs and their values to use it as an input for the game, I wasn’t too hung up on the glitchy nature of the feature. In hind sight, I could have easily allowed that to derail me from my progress on the other features, and I am very proud that I pushed on despite the fact that the feature wasn’t perfect. With this dedicated time to make modifications, I found a simple adjustment that made the voice input work splendidly, and I was able to deduce the solution on my own. The Spectrum Data captures different values based the voice captured, so I changed the if statement from one specific spectrum element to finding the highest of all of the data elements. This make the value respond to whatever pitch or tone in the voice.

Making the art for this game was exciting because it was my first time making any kind of original art, let alone sprites. I have always been hesitant to volunteer myself to make art, but I am now exponentially more confident in my ability to make art assets. Though I still wouldn’t call myself an artist, my game looks great! My characters have personality and the overall casual feel of silliness was achieved.

I am also very proud of my attempt to procedurally add art assets to the scene so that each playthrough looks and feels different. I never liked static backgrounds, so I made different sprites that would spawn randomly in the path of the flight and the sprites change based on the height of the character. This makes it exciting to not only go as far as possible for the points, but also as high as possible to see the new art assets being spawned.

Lastly, I love the Slot Reel ad bonus feature. The two features that most excited the game testers were screaming into the phone and playing the slot reel. It naturally generates pure excitement as a game of chance, but that is because it feels like a real slot reel machine. This month didn’t require any debugging for the slot reel. I dedicated most of last month to get it right and it payed off. The play testers really enjoyed it.

Things I Don’t Like And I Would Like To Change

This game isn’t perfect, and I am okay with that, however there are a few things that irritate me. The other core feature of the game is to record and upload the playthrough to social media. The record feature is something that I finished early on in the development cycle, but as I started making more features, I noticed that it would make the game crash. I pressed on thinking it would be a simple fix, but I didn’t expect the problem to be complex and I couldn’t fix it. It is disappointing to not be able to share a total experience I envisioned to be so fun and valuable on the market.

Secondly, since the record doesn’t work, I wish I would have added more sounds. I banked on the record feature to essentially handle all of the sounds. I didn’t want the game sounds to disrupt the player’s interaction and affect their recorded playthrough quality. Now that the feature isn’t working, the game seems plain and incomplete. I would also liked to have added an option to have a touch-based input for those that don’t want to scream. I think that would incorporate more players and allow gameplay in more settings.

Lastly, without the record feature, the player is basically waiting for the character to fall with no incentive to interact with the game during the launch. I would have liked to add some in-flight input to keep the player engaged.

Overall, I am very proud on my game. I know where the shortcomings are and I have some ideas to make them better before releasing this to the store. This is a unique game that pushed my skills to the limit and I broke through some barriers to become a better Game Designer.

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