Scratch N Score
Another game ‘rolled’ out to the eval group (pardon the pun). Since the process was never truly explained, and because it’s pretty self-explanatory, that’s where a game goes to live or die.. Does it feel like it has a home on the table? And is it good enough. My biggest fear is that that same eval team is going to come back one day and say, nah, we don’t think this fits. Normally that would be fine and dandy, except for the fact that I don’t publish anywhere else now. It’s just not worth it.
One of my big things with all the major stores is the tremendous amount of shovelware and reskins, hundreds of thousands of identical games with different names, and at least 60-70% of it is trash. Sure, there are some gems out there, but you have to shovel through bad to find the good. One of the things I love about the platform I develop for is generally, most of the games are higher quality stuff that feels like it belongs there. Ok, there’s a couple that probably shouldn’t have made it, but hey… 😉
So I do my damndest to make sure my stuff is at least a couple notches above average. They may not be perfect, but I do my best to polish the hell out of them and I try to avoid using and of the thousands of prebuilt templates out there.
This weekend I finally finished up and pushed out Scratch N Score to the eval group. Yes, it’s a clone, but it’s also one that doesn’t exist in their ecosystem, plus it’s one requested by many owners of the device on different facebook groups I have seen, so I am pretty confident it will be a success! Well, fingers crossed! I even added multiple gameplay variations and a lot of options for choosing your playstyle to give it that extra little boost.
So once the eval team tries it out, makes their holy determination, then we go to the beta team. Those guys… MONSTERS!!! They can find bugs where bugs don’t exist. It’s my firm belief that they have a backdoor to my pc and are secretly coding the bugs in so that I have to go fix em. Honestly, they have an amazing team over there, and a ton of dedicated testers who really put a game through its paces. Every now and then something slips through the cracks, but wow! So that’s the next step, we wait, we let the testers get their hands on it and then we sit back and wait for the reports to roll in.
I’m sure a certain tester will find something, probably some obscure combination of button presses on screen that no normal player would even try, and another one will find my spelling and grammar errors… But that’s what makes it a great team. Those guys deserve a lot of credit, because while I consider myself a great programmer, I readily admit as a one man team doing it all, I miss a lot sometimes. Just like this game, I originally wrote the gameplay routines, the scoring and then after a couple weeks realized I had completely screwed it up and had to rewrite 90% of the game play code. It’s better now, but that’s a big hit.
