Postmortem: Ace of Dynamites

After the bad experience I had developing on Android (and equally poor commercial results: with about 300-350 new or updated apps in the puzzle category alone, less than 48 hours after I released Jigsaw Guru, my game got buried in the depths of the marketplace immediately, and it made about $5 of ad revenue in the first 3 months), it was time to go back to my beloved C# and XNA, and make another game for the Windows Phone 7 (WP7 for short), and XBox Live Indie Games channel (XBLIG). This time, I didn't completely start from scratch though: I decided to remake a game I initially created on the Amstrad CPC 6128 twenty years ago, when I was a student with some spare time on his hands.

The project

The original game was brutal: because I was using some hardware trick to scroll the screen at 50 fps, I couldn't do it by less than 4 pixels at a time, which means every move was extremely fast (since, in mode 0, the resolution was only 160x200. For those who are interested, I was also using an overscan technique to cover the whole monitor, and another CRTC reprogramming to have an area at the bottom of the screen that wasn't scrolling, and used the more detailed mode 1 to display times and high scores). Of course nowadays you just redraw the screen each frame and make your level scroll at the speed you want, and I certainly slowed it down a lot in the new version, but the principle of the game hasn't changed: you control a character in 2D tile-based levels, there are enemies bothering you on your way to the exit, and you can push crates and boxes full of dynamite sticks to block or blow these enemies up. I don't have a screenshot of the CPC game (and I haven't actually been able to play it in many years, as the computer's drive belt is dead and needs to be replaced), but here is one of the PC prototype I made with the exact same graphics (hence the low resolution blockiness), next to what is now level 3.1:

The CPC game was called Dedalis (dédale being another word in French to say maze), but I changed the title to try to find something that would describe a bit better what the gameplay is about. Also, unlike in Ace of Dynamites, there was no gem to collect, and no award to unlock, but the rest is pretty much the same, especially the different tiles and what they do.

What went right

Working on a game I already knew and played, even years ago, definitely had some advantages. Of course I had to make many adjustments because of the different platforms, input systems, audiences, etc; but since I'm currently thinking about my next project idea, and trying to figure out what is going to be in it, how it's going to look, and how the different elements will fit together, it's easy to see I have a lot more question marks this time than I did when I started Ace of Dynamites. I wish I could play my next game before starting to work on it, and have a better idea of where I'm going with it; that's basically what happened here.

Developing the WP7 and XBLIG versions at the same time was also a good thing. When I created Jigsaw Guru, I made the WP7 version first, then an Xbox360 version, and finally ported it to Android. The problem with that is each platform has its own characteristics , in terms of performance and resolution for example, but also regarding what you need to provide when you submit the game. Reworking the UI of Jigsaw Guru to make it match completely different aspect ratios took a few days; needing an extra logo to publish a free version wasn't something I had planned for; discovering the 3rd platform required a thumbnail in a much higher resolution than the ones I had wasn't a nice surprise. So, being able to cover all the bases from the beginning, and verify I wasn't putting myself in a corner at any time in the gameplay or UI departments, was definitely a plus on Ace of Dynamites. And if I ever wanted to do an Android version (not that I'm thinking about it at all!), I made sure I have all the iconography I would need.

This one is going to sound like a joke, but it's true: having a phone to test the game was great! As I explained in the postmortem of Jigsaw Guru, I developed my first WP7 game entirely in the emulator, since that was before the phones went on sale. I said the emulator was very reliable, but still: only real hardware can give you a good idea of the performance, it's reassuring to see the game run correctly on one of the devices people will use to play it, and more importantly the emulator can't replace the touch screen when it comes to deciding if some elements have the right size and are not too close to each other to be tapped. Go back to the previous screenshots: on the right one, it's obvious I moved the camera closer, this has the drawback of showing a smaller portion of the level, but without this change I found it was very difficult to tap the exact tile where you want your character to go. In the emulator, you almost have pixel perfect precision all the time with the mouse, and your finger doesn't get in the way, this is a big difference.

Pretty early in the project, I decided I would submit an Xbox360 build of Ace of Dynamites to the Dream Build Play (DBP) competition. That gave me a deadline to shoot for, without adding too much pressure since the game didn't necessarily have to be finished. Of course I wanted to put as much polish as possible into that build, and I think that helped me staying focused.

Working with the same artist as for Jigsaw Guru was a big plus. I knew what Aimee could do, and that we would hit the ground running instantly since we knew what to expect from each other, and even if she wasn't available immediately when I contacted her, I waited rather than look for somebody else. That meant she had less time to do all the art than I had initially planned to give her, but she managed to finish everything a couple of days early nonetheless, which was great. And maybe I also learned my lesson from the previous project: this time the list of what I needed was already finalized before Aimee started to work, I made sure all the question marks had been removed.

Finally, I spent more time polishing this game, and adding little details here and there. For example, when a menu command is selected, in addition to changing color, the dynamite stick that represents the command (Aimee's idea) also generates sparks like if the wick was burning, which emphasizes what item is selected even more, and makes the screen look a bit less static. This is a direct consequence of not having a hard deadline to submit the game, unlike on Jigsaw Guru when I was trying to have a launch title.

Guess what command is selected? (Xbox360 version)

What went wrong

I believed I would be able to reuse most levels from the original CPC game; what a mistake! It actually didn't work that way for several reasons: some levels were too big, especially now that the character moves slower; some levels were too long to complete, in particular for a phone game where play sessions can be quite short; some levels relied on a couple of tiles I didn't keep in the remake, because what they did was a bit confusing; and finally, some levels were just too hardcore. I was still able to use a few maps as is, but in many cases I had to make modifications, or build something different based on the same idea or puzzle. And I had to create and test a bunch of brand new levels, those are usually the ones that are smaller.

On the CPC, handling the character movement and collisions was simple: because one step of the hardware scrolling was exactly half the size of a tile, the character was always either not on a tile at all, half on that tile, or exactly on the tile, on each axis of the 2D world. This is not the case anymore, I implemented real 2D collisions in Ace of Dynamites, but I had a lot of problems with the arrow tiles. As soon as you overlap one of those, even by a very small amount, it's going to start pulling you in the direction pointed by the arrow. In some levels where arrow tiles are next to each other and form some sort of treadmill, that has turns and corners, it was very easy for the character to not take the turns perfectly and end up bumping into some static skull and die. You can imagine how frustrated the testers were.

On the WP7, it's a bit like I have 3 versions: the free game, the paid game when you're playing it in trial mode, and the paid game once you bought it. I didn't think that would be much of a problem, but actually it was. The deal is: the free game has 10 levels, the paid game has 20, but in trial mode you can only play the first 10 (so that it's equivalent to the free game), and at some point I'll add some bonus levels to all versions. So, the question was: for each version, what happens when the player completes the 10th level? The answer is: in the free game, the player goes back to level 1 and the difficulty mode increases, unless there are some bonus levels in which case the player goes to the first of them and the difficulty stays the same; in the paid game, the player goes to level 11 and so on, and after 20 is when he either loops back to level 1, or starts the bonus maps; in trial mode, the game jumps from level 10 to the 1st bonus (which is basically level 21) since levels 11 to 20 are not accessible, or to level 1 if there is no bonus yet. Yeah, that's quite a mess indeed, having just one single case would sound easier, but I wanted to give another shot at having both paid and free versions of the same game in the marketplace, since I didn't do it right with Jigsaw Guru (the free game was an afterthought, a different experiment, that wasn't even advertising its paid counterpart).

The end of this project wasn't fun. After I entered it into the DBP competition, and finished the last few tasks related to polishing the game, all that was left on the XBox360 was submission related (trial mode, a few bugs, the evil checklist...). Then I needed to deal with a bunch of WP7 specific tasks, since I had focused on the console version for a while because of DBP, and those were not exciting either: a few bugs only happening on the phone, certification requirements, trial mode, adding ads, tombstoning, that sort of things. I was hoping to be done at the very end of June, but as often in software development it took a bit more time, and what I'm going to talk about in the next paragraph played a part in that too.

I don't use much middleware really, only the EasyStorage library because it makes life easier to handle saved games on the Xbox360. But this time I wanted to have online leaderboards in the WP7 version, and also try adding analytics, without implementing those things myself. Since I knew some free and battle tested solutions existed, my mistake was to think integrating them would be a piece of cake, and to do those tasks last. Integrating Preemptive Solutions' analytics was in fact easy, but somehow none of my data was showing up on their website, except for the name of my game that was there to prove some messages had indeed been received. When statistics finally appeared 4 days later, I saw they didn't give me the information I wanted, made some modifications, played the game again to generate new data, saw it was queued on the website... and one week later, it still hasn't been processed. I don't know what's up with that, I was certainly hoping for something much closer to real time information, but this is my experience so far. For the leaderboards, I chose Mogade, and it was only a question of bad timing: the code just got rewritten, I ran into a few bugs, and I spent some time verifying my code wasn't the culprit, and looking for workarounds. Fortunately Karl, the author, was very responsive, and fixed the issues very quickly. But the lesson is: when you integrate some external library you haven't seen before, don't wait until the last minute, even if it seems like it's something trivial to use. That's basically why I'm not using the latest version of the Microsoft ads SDK yet: it was released very recently, I was reading in the forums some people had trouble using it, and I didn't want to postpone my submission just to figure out what changed; I'll look into it when I'll make an update for the game.