My first android app/game

Hi,

I got into android programming after following this blog for a while. I’m interested in your feedback! I had some java background so it didn’t take too long to get up and running. The game is intended to help people working on English vocabulary for second language learning or for SAT/GRE’s etc. There are two games, one for antonyms and one for synonyms. I put in scoreloop thanks to your suggestion on the blog, that saved alot of coding work. Thanks for all the hard work and monthly reports on the main page. Keep up the good work.

https://market.android.com/details?id=otter.vocab.tutor

I really like the game, you’ve done a great job with the promotional graphics & background textures. I’m a bit of an English nerd myself, so enjoyed the chance to try out my vocab skills :slight_smile: While I enjoyed the game, there’s a few points I think would make it even better:
[ul]
[li]Improve the appearance of the answers
[/li]Generally I think the 4 button approach works well. But sometimes I saw an answer like “inhalation_general_anesthetic”, which seemed out of place. Why the underscores? Changing this to “Inhalation general anesthetic” with spaces would look a lot nicer.
[li]Remove ads from the actual game play
[/li]It’s very distracting to have ads showing while you’re trying to play the game. Also, not many people deliberately click on the ad because they’re trying to concentrate. Try just showing ads in-between questions. I think it will make users happier, and possibly increase your click-through rate.
[li]Include a “How To Play” screen
[/li]Something on the main menu which tells people how to play, and explains how to get a high score would be helpful. I was not quite sure how the scores were calculated, and this reduced my motivation to keep playing.
[li]Decrease the loading time
[/li]On my device, I had to wait more than 5 seconds between questions while the next question loaded. I’m not sure whether this is deliberate or not, but it gets frustrating after a while. When I get an easy question I’d like to be able to just click straight on to the next question, with no delay.
[/ul]
Thanks for dropping by the forums and sharing your app! I hope some of these suggestions will be helpful. You’re off to a great start with the styling you’ve already done, just polishing up a few of the details would make this a great game.

Cheers,
David

Thanks for the feedback David. We will probably release a second version around Christmas with some updates. The 5 seconds is not deliberate, it depends alot of my web server on the particular day. I have been playing with ways to multi-thread it so the next question is ready faster but its a bit tricky with the single UI thread. I’m hoping that will be resolved soon though :slight_smile:

I have been thinking of maybe a full screen quick loading page with an ad instead of the ads during the game. I will have to play around with different scenarios and see what has the best click through rate.

I was also thinking that there might be a tighter integration with Scoreloop then just using the default UI like I am doing now. Maybe something show how many places the “moved up” after each question would help people stay engaged and they would pay more attention to how the scores are working.

Thanks again for looking at it. I’ll post here when the second version is out.

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