After one week on the Android market, R:P:S Academy looks to get its first update.
There isn’t anything critical in the update, but this version should provide for a smoother user experience. I updated a few GUI things to better explain to the user what is happening, and improved the menu interaction with the Skiller API which proved to have some timing issues due to occasional network delay. Also, the first set of Player Achievements have been enabled.
The basic polish and explanation issues were things like the need to make it more clear in game that a game is played as a first to 5 match. I quickly realized that this wasn’t prominently displayed anywhere and many new players didn’t seem to know what the victory conditions were.
Achievements were left out of the original release. The Skiller API returns an error when an Achievement is claimed, but this doesn’t seem to have a negative impact, so I am going to suppress the error message and activate achievements. I also added a new achievement “6-Pack” that you can claim by winning a game that has a 6-pack on the game board.
Perhaps more important changes revolve around menu interaction. I suspected that this might be a problem before the initial release, but didn’t implement a propper solution. The nature of using a 3rd party API(Skiller in this case) puts some constraints on what a developer can do, espically when that API is communicating over the internet. The Skiller API uses a callback system which is good, but that doesn’t always alert ME to what the user has done until sometimes a little bit after they have done it. The biggest issue seemed to be when a user selected a game to join in the game lobby. The lobby screen shuts down and the main menu is brought back to the front – then a progress dialog lets the user know that the game is loading until the game starts. Due to network delay and the callback system, there were frequently delays between the main menu being redisplayed and the progress dialog poping up. Many users were using that time to click some more buttons, which causes all kinds of havoc. A similar issue could occur while creating a multiplayer game right before or after a fee is chosen.
I did the best I could to try to minimize the opportunity of button clicking while waiting on a callback, but since I can’t always know when a callback is coming they can’t be totally eliminated, and there is a tradeoff with slowing down someone that isn’t expecting a callback, for example when they cancel the game lobby rather than join a game. I hope that this version has a much better continuity and user understanding of when the system is “thinking”
Other things of interest: I got the market to stop filtering out tablets, even though SMS messaging is included in the Skiller API
Still trying to figure out how to hit that critical mass a multiplayer game needs to support itself. But don’t forget, the built in learning AI is also a fun challenge – play against it while waiting for a real opponent. Don’t forget to invite your friends to join the R:P:S fun.