Category: Graphics

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Feedback

The game got a lot of good feeback on the AppHub playtest forum.  I’ve resolved most of the issues that other developers found.

Device Selection Issue

There was one report that the game wouldn’t play on any controller index, even though I tested that case multiple times.  After doing some more testing with all four controllers, I found that if one of the controllers was not signed into an account, then it would stay on the storage device selection screen if a storage device is not already selected.  Therefore, on the load screen the “Select Device” button didn’t appear to do anything, because there was no profile to select the storage device.  The screen was misleading, because what the user really needs to do is sign-in (however it did say “must be signed in to use storage device”), but it didn’t automatically take the player to the XBox profile login screen.  After doing some research, I found that the PlayerIndex is not a mandatory parameter for the DeviceSelection control.  Therefore, I just removed that parameter, so now all players (signed-in or not signed-in) can select a storage device.  The only downside is that now all players on the system share the same save data, but I doubt there will be any complaints about that.

Component Selection

Another developer reported that it was difficult to tell which component is currently selected.  This is simple to see in later levels with many selectable components, but I can understand that it is difficult on the early levels with only two selectable components.  I went ahead and added a simple animated arrow which points to the currently selected component, which should remove any doubt on which component is selected.  I also created a frame sprite to display around the selected item, but it didn’t look good so I just stuck with the arrow.

Tutorial Tips

Since this is an unconventional game, some players didn’t fully understand the game mechanics.  I’ve always thought that part of the fun was learning the game, but I don’t want anyone to get frustrated at the start of the game.  Therefore, I’ve added tips that display to the left of the game board for the starting levels.  I wanted to have these tips scroll across the bottom like a television news feed, but I didn’t have enough vertical screen real estate in the title safe area.

I ended up putting the tips off to the left side, since there was a lot of unused space there.  At first, I only had the tips display if the amount of time for the S-rank had elapsed, so that expert players wouldn’t see the tips.  However, this resulted in the tip flashing at the last second if the level is completed slightly after the time required for the S-rank.  Therefore, I decided just to have the tip fade in and let all players see them.  Trying to figure out how to get text to fade-in was a lengthly process.  At first I thought all I had to do was pass a color object with the fourth parameter set to the alpha, but this does not work when specifying the first three RGB parameters as well. (good grief!)  Fortunately, I found an article which explained that you have to multiply the color by the alpha value for it to work right, such as Color.White * 0.5f.  It’s mind boggling why just new Color(255, 255, 255, 128) won’t work.

Activating LEDs with  Lower Flow Value

Another suggestion was to remove the ability to activate LEDs with flow lower than the LED value.  I think that would make the game too difficult for a casual audience.  The game appropriately penalizes the player in the “luminosity” rank if the LEDs are not using the maximum values.  However, I did modify the colors of the activated LEDs if those are not using the maximum value.  Now those are colored light blue.  I will probably also add a different sound effect as well.

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Stick a Fork in It

Title Safe

Noticed that the title safe area on the PC is the entire window, so things looked slightly off when it is running in  a window.   Went back and removed the device specific Title Safe Area rectangle, with my own that I calculate based on the size of the screen that I define, using 10% around the edges as the unsafe area.

Device Storage

The fast transition of the device selection screen on the XBox Slim was very noticeable, due to the bright yellow background color.  This screen is only displayed for a split second, since there is only one storage device which is automatically selected.  I’m not sure why it won’t let me select between the hard drive and cloud storage.  I removed the yellow screen and replaced it with the standard background color, but the “select storage device” message still flickered for a brief second, so I put in a counter to delay the display of the message for 60 frames.  Now, the message should only display if there is a problem.

I also need to go back and modify the “reset all data” functionality, so that it takes advantage of the new load storage screen.   I don’t have the time to fix this, so I went ahead and removed the “Delete All records” functionality from the level select screen.  I never liked the fact that there was no selector for it on the screen, and adding the functionality back using the new saving method will just be too much of a hassle at this point.  I can use that time to do better things.  Plus, I did learn previously that the player’s data can be deleted from the XBox system menu.

Four Controller Ports

Added code to hold the controller state for all four controller ports.  Apparently, I don’t need to check to see if a controller is actually active to get its state.  Added a parameter to Screen methods which handle button presses, so that now those take an int parameter which signifies which controller port pressed that button.

Updated the code so that it now allows the device selector to be opened and controlled by the controller port which started the game.  Added exceptions to handle a save after the user has signed out of their profile during the game.

Tried using the Guide message display API call to display a message to the user if the game was no longer being saved due to the user signing out, but it also has the problem of crashing if the guide is active, so I didn’t bother with it.

Marketplace

After reading threads about others who have failed peer review, I added a check to ensure that the logged in player can purchase content before the Marketplace screen is shown on the trial screen.  I’m thinking that 21 levels for the trial may be a bit too much.  I’m doubting that anyone can complete that many levels within 8 minutes, and my purchase screen is only displayed after those 21 levels are complted.  However, people can still buy the game through the main marketplace window.  The user can play the 8 minute trail multiple times, selecting the other levels (up to 21, 3-1) that they have not completed, so therefore it is possible to the player to complete all 21 trial levels to see the purchase screen.

I’m trying not to be like most other games which have “buy buy buy” plastered all of the game’s interface.  After all, if the player likes the game, then I’m sure they will know how to buy it from the marketplace menu.

Graphics Updates

Updated the cell selector to use the a symbol representing a resistor.  Went back and made it a hand drawn anti-aliased line using the Gimp brush tool, with the middle cut out.  Added a slight green glowing effect to this selector sprite.

Also added another overlay to the filled light, which is a sprite of two white filled arcs.  This rotates for each filled light.  It looks much better than what the screenshot shows.

  

Minor Changes

On the title screen, I also changed “New Game” to “Start Game”.  I thought people may think that “New Game” will overwrite their existing record data, which isn’t the case.

After checking the Not So Evil Checklist again, the game won’t be failed for a Code 7 crash, which results from the account with the App Hub subscription signing out.  So I just needed to ensure that it is playable from any controller port.

Learned that I don’t have to recreate the XBox entry XNA Studio Device Center and re-enter the key after restarting the XBox.  I’ve just got to ensure that the XBox device for the active system is set as default.

Wrapping Up

At this point, I’m considering this game to be done.  I tested it using all of the checks on the Evil Checklist, and I believe it passes all of them now.  I will sleep on it overnight, and may play test some  more of the levels again tomorrow, since I have tomorrow off of work for Memorial Day.  Unless there is some major issue that must be fixed, I plan on submitting it to the contest tomorrow.  Thanks to everyone who has read my status updates.


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Play it Again Sam

Wrapping Up Level Design

Created 20 new levels, which use the 7 and 8 resistors.  Now I have a total of 80 levels.  If each level takes 30 seconds to play, then it would make the total time to play through all the levels 40 minutes.  This is not counting the replay time, which I’m sure some people will want to do to get the best ranks in all the levels.

While playtesting, I noticed a few issues with some of the levels that I have noted:

Level 7-5:  The 6 LEDs block the 8 LEDs, so the maximum luminosity can never be achieved.  Either remove the 6 LEDs, lower the 8  LEDs to 6 or below, or add tiles to make the 8 LEDs accessible without connecting to the 6 LEDs.

Level 7-8:  There is no way to activate the 1 LEDs without first lowering the 6 LEDs and 4 LEDs to one.  Again, this makes it impossible to get the maximum luminosity.

Level 7-9:  There is no way to activate the 5 LED without lowering it to four.

Level 8-2:  Accidentally added 8 and 1 batteries, when I intended for those to be LEDs.

  

 

Scales of Difficulty

I still feel like there needs to be something extra in the game.  I did have the idea to add capacitors, encoders, and logic gates, but it is too late now to make major changes in the game engine.  Those will have to wait for Resistor 2.  If I make any changes to the engine (even just moving the starting location of the cursor), then I will have to recalculate the time ranks for all of the stages, which is something I don’t want to do.  I think this is the right level of difficulty to reach the largest player base.  Most players probably make up their mind in about 10 seconds of first starting a game on whether or not the game is too difficult to play.  If the game isn’t easy to pick up, people will put the game in the “too hard” pile in their minds and give up on it.  On the other hand, I don’t want a game that is so easy that players will get bored with it.  This is definitely a delicate scale to balance, and that scale is different for each person.  I would rather error on the side of being too easy, because players may go ahead and play through the boring parts to see if there is something better coming.  If the game is too hard, then people will drop it and never play again.  However, there is a niche out there for very difficult games (Super Meat Boy, I Want to be the Guy), but that is only a very limited number of players compared to the overall pool of game players in the world.

Replay Option Added

One of the things that frustrated me while I was playtesting the game, was that if I did not get the best ranks on a stage then it would automatically send me to the next stage.  I really wanted to play the same stage again, so I could get the best ranks.  This made me have to quit, go back to the level select screen, and then scroll all the way back down to the level I was playing.  This was very aggravating, so on the GameWinScreen I added two options, “Replay” and “Next”.  Next is default, so the player still only has to press the confirm button to move to the next stage.  Pressing left will select “Replay”, which will just load the current stage again, so that the player can try to get better ranks.  These options don’t appear until the game win pause has expired (after all of the ranks have displayed).

This also sheds light on another problem, that on the Level Select screen it can take quite a while to scroll down to the later levels.  In a way, this is a good thing that there are so many levels to display, it takes some time to get to the bottom.  This reminds me of the game “You Don’t Know Jack” for the XBox 360, which had over 70 total episodes, so it took forever to select one of the later levels.  What I really need to do is have the trigger or bumper buttons jump up or down 10 levels on the level select screen.  The benefit of this is minimal, so I probably won’t take the time to implement that feature now.

Menu Backgrounds

Spent some time touching up the menu selector graphics.  This can really be a time drain, because I can spend hours on the graphics and it still not look perfect to me.   One reason I really don’t like doing graphics is because there is no right or wrong answer.  There’s just people’s preferences, which will be different for each person.  Added the bevel effect for all selectors.  I changed the main menu selector to a box, but I wasn’t happy with the color of the selector.  If it’s too light, then you can’t read the menu text.  If it’s too dark, then it contrasts too much with the rest of the screen, drawing attention away from the title graphics.  Fortunately, I can change the color programmatically, so I don’t have to change the graphic each time in Gimp.  Just as I was about to give up, I used a less saturated shade of green (selected from the scrolling background image), which looks fairly good as the selector color.

  

I went ahead and changed the font color for the 5 resistor to black, because white was a little hard to see.  Currently, only the 4, 5, and 9 resistors have black text.

Trailer Video

In order to submit this game to the contest, I have to submit a trailer video.  Therefore, I took a shot at making my first trailer video with its own cheesy indie game song.

 

Blog Cleanup

Went through all the posts in this blog and added categories, so that all of the posts related to Graphics, Engine, Game Saves, Level Design, and Audio can be quickly displayed and accessed.  A Video Update category was also added, to easily display all posts with video content.  Casual and Technical categories were added, so that the casual audience can view  posts targeted towards them.