Hi Harmony here…
Today I did some game play testing of the new game we are beta testing right now.
If you want to do some beta testing you can opt in here: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.ZuluOneZero.TheDogRun
Feedback can be posted on the website in the comments or directly by email at
zuluonezero.z10@gmail.com
This is the hardware and software that I’m currently using to make games.
My main machine is a Venom BlackBox laptop. It’s got an i5 Intel Core and 8 GB of RAM. The OS c:\ drive is flash and the d:\ storage drive is SAS. so the operating system stays fast but it also has plenty of local storage. This was my main expense and after working for years on a 3nd hand Toshiba it’s an absolute dream. They are made locally in Melbourne at a place called MLN Computers who specialize in Gaming Hardware and it’s just beautifully finished and super thin and light. Plus it’s Batman black with green backlit keys if you want them. Off mains it’s a bit of a battery hog but for what I do on it and the process heavy apps I use it does pretty well. It gives a lot of power and is very stable. The only down side is because it is very thin the fan comes on quickly and can be loud to the point of distraction sometimes.
I do a lot of music and audio work on my laptop and use a Line 6 KB37 midi keyboard and digital USB audio interface. I got this years ago and its been super awesome. It come bundled with the Line 6 Pod Farm software and a bunch of other audio apps like Reason 10 and Ableton Lite and virtual instruments from Korg (the amazing Korg Legacy Collection), and Applied Acoustics (the fully versatile AAS Player and gorgeous LoungeLizard EP-4). Sadly it’s no longer made and I have no idea what I’m going to do if it ever gives up the ghost – probably go back to Linux Audio (sadly the KB37 was incompatible with my Linux audio box if you ever get the chance to play with it I recommend Musix or Ubuntu Studio but there are heaps of other options).
For either guitar or keyboard it’s fabulously versatile and can also interface with whatever Daw I’m using.
I bought a second hand Wacom drawing tablet. When I picked it up it turned out to be an old one from one of Melbourne’s larger game companies. I took that as a good sign.
I started making games in htlm5 and all I really needed for software was a copy of Sublime Text 3, Gimp and the Tiled map editor.
I moved on to Unity3d and Visual Studio 2017 but still use Gimp as my main art making software.
I tried lots of other art packages like Spriter, Krita, Pencil, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, and GraphicsGale. All of them were good but I like Gimp best. It seems to have all the features that I need and I’m more comfortable with the open source nature of the project.
I tried lots of other Game Engines as well: Stencyl, Unreal Engine and Amazon Lumberyard but I think I’ll stick with Unity for a while.
For model making I use Blender. I find it easier than the other programs I’ve tried (even with all the keyboard shortcuts). The community is awesome too.
I also really like using MagicaVoxel for quick fun models.
I tried DAZ Studio, DesignDoll and Sculptris but I always come back to Blender.
For animation in 2D I use Plastic Animation Paper (PAP4 ) and Gimp. I really like PAP4. It’s old but has very powerful features. I use Blender for 3D Animation.
For making video content and editing I use the OpenShot Video Editor.
All my documentation is done with OpenOffice.
For Source Control I use GitHub and TortoiseSVN, or a local Helix Perforce service.
For an Android emulator I either use Android Studio, KOPLAYER or Leapdroid. I think Leapdroid is my favourite.
I have a really really big list of software that I tried and never really used. Mostly because I just never got time and if I spent all my time getting new toys I wouldn’t have time to play with the ones I already have.
One of the best ways to get noticed on the App Store (any one) is to have a video that markets your games best assets. We recently did one for NumBlocks which has, in all honesty, been struggling to make an impact on the Play Store. The game is elegantly simple and looks great. It has a good mechanic and is easy to learn and play. We built it as a platform to test our ability to publish something and to work through the hurdles of getting a game finished. In that respect it is perfect!
Have a go of NumBlocks and let us know what you think? (click image to Play)
Not having a huge budget for marketing we wanted to make it ourselves. Were not audio visual newbies and weren’t looking for anything too complex. Plus the game is free so there is really no point paying someone to effectively polish a lump of coal in the diamond that we know it is.
Here is the finished product (click to Play!):
We used the OpenShot Video Editor. Here at ZuluOneZero we support open source community driven projects as our default posture when looking for software to work with. OpenShot Video Editor is crafted with love and open-source. It’s under the free & open-source license forever (GPL version 3.0).
It’s very good and worked perfectly for our project. It has a simple but powerful interface and comes with a very nice set of built in transitions and other features.
We started off with a straight image of our NumBlocks logo. I really like the glowing internal light of this logo and the straightforward “Play” on the front. We did this icon in Gimp and imported it into the editor.
Check it out:
Next we got crafty. I asked the team (read ‘my brain’) for a flashing run through of the numbers in sequence to build tension and to lead in to the game play. We tried doing this manually in the editor but it was too fiddly lining up 40+ images with the right timing. So we came up with a novel solution and ended up opening all the number icon jpegs directly from the operating system folder onto the system picture viewer. We then used the built in Game Bar that comes with Windows 10 to record a screen capture of the viewer. I manually scrolled through the number icons with the arrow keys on the keyboard at the tempo I wanted and sped up to a crescendo at the end.
We used the record feature of the game bar again to record the game play sequences. This time we ran the app on a mobile emulator on the desktop. The only issue I had with the final outcome of this was that the mouse pointer has to be used and looks a bit derpy. Next time I’ll download a pointy finger mouse icon to use so it looks more like a mobile game. We edited the footage down to key sequences and game play.
Next I used the OpenShot speed manipulation tools to speed up a section of the game play footage to make it look more exciting and to showcase the game.
Next we stripped the audio from the existing clips and laid down some original music from the game. You can listed to the music here on SoundCloud.
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I was getting rather upset with myself for not finishing my game yet. I had spent a lot of time learning how to get the animation of the dog into a state that wasn’t completely crap but … that a game does not make. I couldn’t visualize what the game was about anymore and I couldn’t actually see the point of continuing. It seems sometimes that it’s easier to cut your losses and just give up when a project is not coming together and weeks have turned into months .
I used to spend a lot of time doing quick two week Dev runs for a game. In those two weeks I’d get a good feel for the game and by the end of it I’d know if it was going to be viable. I spend a lot of time planning and doing design docs and color charts and programming core functionality. It’s quick fun and satisfying but it’s not an end product and I probably wouldn’t even show most of those games to close friends. But that’s what they are about, learning quickly if your idea is going to work or not.
So this game was about taking an idea from start to finish. Making everything as good as I could. Spending time getting drawings right. It’s much harder and takes much longer than you think. And those weeks where not much happens really impact on the sense of progress and achievement. Its easy to slowly get disillusioned.
You might want to give up and start hacking for fun again. You might get stressed that time spent doing all this work for nothing was going to have you end up in the poor house (auto-corrected from poo house – which is a real place too). You might suspect that you have extended your childhood too far into responsible adult life and that you are a talentless man-child who will never do anything. Ermmm.
I know some get feelings like this more than others and I’m truly sorry for their pain in life. In truth I’m probably living in a fantasy world but its one of my own making and to fuel it I need inspiration. The desire to make games stems from a belief that if you do what you enjoy then you will be good at it and successful. Also I think the gamefication of life makes it better and more enjoyable.
Simple things like watching the Mrs trying to catch grapes in her mouth for the first time and Everything my son does. At nine everything he does is a game. He never walks to his room if he can jump pillows down the hall (lava!).
Games can be addictive. God knows I’ve had to strip even Tetris and Minesweeper from old computers just to get some “real” work done. So I have a vague feeling of guilt when I play games instead of making them or doing something else productive.
The point is there are good reasons to make games, and better reasons to try and make great one’s. So that’s what happened. I played a game I was using as a reference and benchmark for my own and quite simply it inspired me. So now let’s get back to making games.
I finally got the game I started in November into some semblance of how I wanted it to look. The running dog animation anyway. Still playing with different backgrounds but this one is sure “fun”.
It took a long time to get all the dog actions done drawing each one by hand and getting a lot of unsatisfactory results. The animation is all “flip-book” style with each frame a different drawing. There were between 70 to 80 pictures for the entire set.
The art was done in gimp with the help from some nice veterinarian manuals on the dog gait.
I mocked up a few transitions from an opening scene to a nice zoom down to playing position.
Then moved between a sedate walk to a running gallop and a little jump. She looks like she’s really flying now!
During this time I also had a big problem with corrupted a scene after playing in the Animator window. Big tip and future post – do not restart Unity if it crashes without taking a copy of your temp directory first. It took me about two weeks to rebuild everything but more on that later.
When ZuluOneZero published NumBlocks on the Google Play Store we went through the requisite development phases.
The game has been released now – have a play:
NumBlocks published on the Google Play Store for Android.
Click to Play:
Also on the Amazon Play Store for Android and Kindle.
Click to Play:
This was our first app that we thought looked good enough to give away to real users.
I was very proud of the artwork and how the game played on screen.
It’s a simple no-frills game but it was a perfect test platform to scope out what’s required to get a game published.
Which incidentally is a little daunting but in reality the whole process of publishing a game on the Google Play Store was pretty easy.
The Google Play Console was easy to use and there were plenty of official and community references to help us through it.
We went through several development iterations and found a revision that worked on most Android platforms.
We were running Unity 5 and targetting all mobiles above Android API 15 4.03 called “Ice Cream Sandwich”.
Not being a big shop our test devices were old personal phones that were around this API version. It was running well and looked great an a VM but once we started using our physical test devices we found a few issues dealing with different screen resolutions and one phone didn’t have enough resources to run the random number generator so that the same numbers kept spewing out.
Then we upgraded to Unity 2017.1.0f3 and lost support for those older API’s. Oops no more supported hardware to test on! We really needed to get some Beta Testers who could trial the game on a variety of different platforms that we couldn’t access. We could test thoroughly with virtual machines but as we found when testing on real phones there are some things about how the game looks and plays that can only be reproduced on the real platform.
So our marketing team (Harmony and Felicity) and I did some research on recruiting Beta Testers and we quickly realised that we couldn’t affort to pay for the service.
We did find a wealth of paid services out there which I’ll list below in case someone can make use of that information.
Not all of these services were paid but most of them required some sort of effort or buy-in up front that we couldn’t match.
http://appstorm.net/
http://appuseful.com/app/add
http://betacandy.com/
http://betali.st/
http://betalist.com/
http://betapage.co/
http://betatesters.io/?utm_source=InstabugBlog&content=betatestbeginnersguide
http://erlibird.com/
http://makeuseof.com/
http://market.thenextweb.com/
http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/
http://quora.com/
http://startupli.st/
http://startuplift.com/
http://web.appstorm.net/
http://www.betabound.com/
http://www.betabound.com/announce/
http://www.mob4hire.com/
http://younoodle.com/
https://betafamily.com/
https://feedmyapp.com/
https://inspiredbeta.com/
https://www.topcoder.com/
https://www.usertesting.com/
https://www.utest.com/
So we turned our attention to the online communities that might be able to assist us.
We did some more research and found that social media is literally teeming with sites and groups that want to Beta Test your app. Awesome. Problem solved.
We published a Beta version of the app on the Play Store and mocked up some Beta Testing campaign ideas along with a set of goals that we had for Beta Tests. We were looking for technical testers as opposed Marketing and I can tell you I was pretty excited about getting some feedback on the game. When we pubished the Beta version of the game we could choose a number of Beta testers that the game would be released to. The interface gave us a minimum of 1000 users so we went with that and given the number of social media sites we found thought that this didn’t sound all that unreasonable.
This is a brief list of the social media sites and lists and groups that we advertised for Beta Testers on….
Google Communities:
Android Beta Tests
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/109783274236354693762
Android Game Developer
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/107240075790372473394
Indie Game Developers
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/116817422244345691332
Game Developers
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/100673606633986699530
Game Developers
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/101640237427303194102
Game Programmers
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102656807509358954492
Mobile Game & App Developers
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/107514033174068960125
http://www.reddit.com:
/r/TestMyApp
/r/alphaandbetausers
/r/AndroidAppTesters
/r/startups
/r/betatests
/r/androidapps
https://twitter.com/:
search?q=%23Betatesting%20&src=typd
search?q=%23Betatesters&src=typd
search?q=%23Testmyapp&src=typd
search?q=%23Indiedev&src=typd
We even did a big call through our Facebook Page and Blog.
Guess how many Beta Testers came flocking to try out our great new game…..
None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Not one.
We checked around the boards on these sites and groups and actually found very little actual Beta Testing going on.
After a few weeks of interacting with these communities and even testing a few apps ourselves thinking that we might get some kind of Beta Testers Karma we still found that no-one really wants to test your app (unless maybe if you are building a huge free MMO that’s going to be awesome – anyone doing that?).
So there you have it – Beta Testing using social media groups doesn’t work. You don’t get nufin’ for free in life.
So my advice to you is that if you don’t have one already, start building an email list now. For a startup game dev studio with no support framework it’s pretty hard to come by free help when you need it. Ideally, start collecting email addresses before you even have an app, and keep at it! Because even a handfull of Beta Testers is better than none.
Hi,
It’s Harmony here!
We added our first game to the Amazon App Store for play on the Android and Kindle platforms.
Now you can play on even more devices!
If you can add up two numbers that make Ten …. Great …. You can Play!
It’s simple and fun.
NumBlocks Base Ten lets you stack, sort, and mash numbers together.
As long as they add up to zero (duh!) or ten.
Try different strategies to beat your high score.
Stack them, sort them, or mash them together as they fall – just get them before they hit the top!
Best of All … It’s FREE with NO ADS!
Click the image to Play!
Some months back I went to a local presentation by the Unity champions at The Arcade (a collaborative workspace specifically for game developers and creatives) in Melbourne. It was one of those “learn about others and gain insight into one’s self” moments. One thing I picked up from one of the presenters from Hipster Whale (makers of Crossy Road) was that when they were developing a new game they tried to keep the proof of concept to a two week period. Some time later with this in mind I presented to myself the “Five Games in Ten Weeks Challenge!” to see if I could really push out five different games in ten weeks.
Five Games in Ten Weeks
Hi Zulu here – We started work on a new game this week called Peace Run. I wanted to do a continuous runner and really liked the idea of having a line drawing animation that looks like the player character “grows” out of the line. The runners will be animal silhouettes like the dog shown here.
Doing the frame by frame animation has been really fun but it took a lot of trial an error to get to this point – which as you can tell isn’t perfect yet.
All the artwork was done in GIMP 2 and the game design is in Unity3d. We used a simple animation script to play the start of the walk sequence. I can’t wait to get this puppy into a run and a full sprint.
Hi Zulu here – we just got our latest game NumBlocks into the Play Store and have opened it up for Beta Testing.
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.ZuluOneZero.NumBlocks
NumBlocks is a fun numbers game that’s easy to learn but hard to master.
This is our first game in the Play Store and is a great test bed for us.
We wanted something small and simple that looked good in action and was fun – NumBlocks was our answer. It was the front runner to our “Five Games in Ten Weeks” challenge and broke a lot of new ground for us.