Make changes based on data, not your gut

 Dev Notes, Neil Rajah  No Responses »
May 072012
 

Today has been a day of “that should have been obvious” moments. First, I was wondering why Neil Rajah was no longer on the ‘top new free’ list, and whether the fact that I changed its name with the last update had anything to do with it. Turns out, it was a coincidence, because I also crossed the 30-day anniversary of the original release, and that’s how long an app stays in any of the ‘new’ lists.

There was another change I made with the latest update – I removed support for the ‘small’ screen size. I figured these would mostly be older devices that wouldn’t run the game very well, and disabling support would reduce the chance of bad reviews. I know the game works at those resolutions, I’ve tested many width/height combinations with the desktop build to make sure that everything scales properly. But it seemed like a good idea to not support low-end phones.

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I just released a medium-sized update to Neil Rajah

 Neil Rajah  No Responses »
May 052012
 

What the heck is a medium sized update? I can’t really call it a major update, but it’s got more changes than the previous updates :) This was prompted by a combination of things – Just Reboot’s review where he reported that the game was crashing for him, and Amazon rejecting the updated version for the same reason – crashes. I hadn’t really been paying much attention to BugSense, but that prompted me to take a closer look. I was getting over 200 crashes a day – that’s way too much. So I started working on the most frequently occurring errors, and also started a discussion with Just Reboot’s deidein, getting his feedback on what he thought could be improved. I haven’t implemented everything he pointed out, but they were all good suggestions.

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Anyone want to try a preview build of the new Bus Jumper?

 Bus Jumper, Dev Notes  6 Responses »
Sep 132011
 

I’m almost done with the updates. The last remaining item is a better texture for the road, and so far my efforts have all been pretty sucky. I’ll spend some more time on it, but if I don’t like the results, I’m going back to the stripes I have now. Other than that, I’m done with the changes I wanted to make.

If you’re interested in trying out a preview build, leave a comment with a valid email address (which is only visible to me, it doesn’t show up on the blog) and I can send you a link to the apk file.

Bus Jumper update update

 Bus Jumper, Dev Notes  No Responses »
Sep 122011
 

No, that’s not a typo, because this is a status update on the Bus Jumper update :) I pulled up the list of changes I’d mentioned here to see how I’m doing.

  • Crazy mode – Gone. If your crazy mode score was higher than the easy mode score, the game will pick that up as your ‘high score’
  • UI cleanup – I think I’m done playing with this for now. It looks better than before, and I incorporated some suggestions I got based on the screenshots. I’ll send out a preview build when I’m ready to release the changes, and I might tweak the UI based on feedback
  • ‘Remove Ads’ button – gone
  • Social networks – Added buttons to open up my Facebook page, my Twitter profile, and this blog. See this post for some hoops I jumped through to get the Facebook link to open in the right app
  • Sounds – Again, done for now, pending feedback that they’re really terrible. I took out the jump sound, it plays too often and gets annoying. I have an array of collision sounds, and I randomly play one of them on a collision with a ‘ball’ (not with the platforms). It seems reasonably varied with 4 sounds, but I might add more if that starts to feel too repetitious
  • Achievements – Done. Also switched to OpenFeint from Scoreloop, see details here. I just finished testing the code that will pick up your current high score and send it to OpenFeint on the first launch. So I shouldn’t have a bunch of pissed-off customers who lost their leaderboard rankings

Not too bad for a weekend’s worth of work.

So what’s left:

  • Gameplay tweaks – I’ll probably tackle this next
  • Graphics overhaul – Saved this for last, since this is going to be the most visible difference, and I always procrastinate when I need to work on graphics