Tile

Hi again,

Just releasing a new game called Tile. It works off the same datasets that my previous vocab tutor game worked off of.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=otter.tile

I’d be interested in what you think about the game play. I’m not sure if the difficulty level is correct or if it is too challenging.

Thanks,
Nathan

Hi Nathan,

I downloaded your game and here are my observations after playing the game for 5 minutes.

  1. Crashes and Force Closure
    a)Force close on starting the game. Seems it is java out of memory error. So check out how you handle the bitmaps. I already sent feedback of the error.
    b) Crash when i press to check scores on Scoreloop after game had ended . This happened twice. Also after pressing “play again” on the dialog box i got the same error.
    c)Force closure on pressing play and before loading the board. From the stack trace it seems to be a Null pointer exception.(Happened thrice) So fix that please. You don’t want your users to go through this.

  2. There is a tricky bug here. During game play, when one presses the menu button and clicks either leaderboard or review app, the countdown timer still continues and it was funny when i finished reviewing and pressed back button,i was met with the game over dialog. Also, sound handling is an issue, During game play if the sound is on and i press menu and then to leaderboard or review app, the sound still plays. Its funny when one is in Google play or scoreloop and game sounds are still on. Not unless this was the intended action.

  3. It is not very clear the objective of the game and the title of the app doesn’t do much to help this. I had to go back to the app’s description on Google play to have an idea(maybe i am this dumb) but i generally i think it wouldn’t hurt to give some small info or help section about the game.(Just my opinion).

4.Overall cool game but quite difficult. I only managed to get 0 after 3 trials lol ;-)I will give you a 5 star review when all these issues are fixed…:slight_smile:

NB: Sorry for too much details but i think my descriptions will help to fix these bugs during the early stages before many people download the game and start giving 1 star reviews.

All the best!

Thanks for the good feedback! I’m looking at the memory issue now, may I ask which model phone you have (or im me it). I only have 2 models to test on so maybe I can recreate the model in an emulator.

Yes I really need a how to play section I think :slight_smile:

Thanks again,
Nathan

You are welcome. I tested this on Sony ericsson xperia Neo. Android 2.3.4.

Regards.

Hi again!

Well I think we have fixed all the issues you mentioned and reported. Seems that it wasn’t the size or handling of the images but the density of them (at least from what I could recreate in the emulator).

I have put the game back up at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=otter.tile

I’d love to get some opinions on it. I have also added two new game modes since it might be a bit hard. A learning mode without a timer and a Demo Tutorial that walks the user through one question.


Thanks again for the help!
Nathan

p.s. make sure its version 1.02 I think 1.01 was still up when i posted this

Well I have not received any forced closes this time so that’s good news hopefully the virtual memory issue is resolved.

I am curious if anyone has any suggestions on the difficulty level. People are not scoring very high (I do of course since I understand the game). I wonder maybe if I should make the Demo Tutorial the default choice for users the first time they play.

I tried playing your game (and ranked second in the leaderboards) for a while. I thought it was a fun game, but to be honest I had never heard of a lot of those words. I think for someone who is not a native english speaker a lot of those words will be too hard. Also some questions was about Baseball. In Sweden baseball is not a very big sport and so it was almost impossible for me to figure out the answers to those questions without guessing.

So I think you should do it a bit easier. Sure, maybe it’s a good way to learn new word but I found it mostly frustrating when I failed to answer several questions in a row without guessing.

Good game, keep working on it. :slight_smile:

Also when I got one of the advertisements that takes up the whole screen for the first time it just forwarded me to the Google Play store which was pretty annoying. When trying to go back it just wouldn’t work but I was forwarded over and over again when pressing the back button (as it then seemed to load the advertisement once again).

Hi thanks for the feedback. I’m not sure about the ad thing. I just put in the leadbolt ad so I’m not too familiar with why it might do that. I’ll report the problem to leadbolt.

Ya the word are coming from a database but I too noticed alot of baseball words. I think I will write a script to filter those out of the database.

I’m glad the structure of the game was clear. I was getting worried people wouldn’t understand the overall gameplay.

Thanks again,