We are back in the office! (Weekly Report - 12th October)

We've come out of holiday and ready to start thinking about probably doing some work

This Tuesday we had discussed the work we did(n't) do during the holidays and came out with some objectives for the next week. We also managed to fit in a little basic user testing swap meeting during the class.

 

What did we actually do in the holidays?

• Almost nothing, because we were on holiday!
• Actually before going on holiday we half thought about a new structural idea and half implemented that, then decided it was too much work, we don't need it anyway so we half reversed some of the junk we didn't want anymore but decided there were some good things. The result was that we left it in a pretty unusable state with no notes on what to fix. 
• We did manage to obtain official permission from Brian Wright (also known under the alias of A Big Guitar) to use his music in our iPhone application. You can find out more about him here : http://www.broadjam.com/artists/home.php?artistID=52469. His music is just amazing, he does a lot of nice solo guitar work (as you could guess from the alias) and the general emotions fit in perfectly with the game style that we are going for.

 

Objectives list :

• Do everything

1.     But only for the first two ~ three levels.
2.     This includes giving it a professional presentation
3.     and everything else

 

Basic user testing indications

Ok we had some crashing issues (as described in the what did we do in the holidays section) but we quickly fixed those before the end of class and had the opportunity to participate in the user testing session. Also just quickly fixed the plane movement algorithm on level 1. The plane now rotates (with that cool rotational animation sprite) full time, and the user can move him by tapping anywhere on screen (movement on Y axis only still, he won't just teleport to that location, he will smoothly move to there) or by dragging his finger around the screen and plane will follow (follows instantly now rather than with huge delay as before thanks to new algorithm).

What did we find out from the user testing?

• The Text Label Menu Items were terrible. We were of course pretty accustomed to those because we programmed the thing, but everyone else couldn't click on the menu items properly without a lot of fuss. Thanks to finding this out, we will be changing those hard to tap labels with button/image items which have a greater surface area.
• One of the testers indicated that he wanted a master mute option directly on the gameplay screen, he said this feature is common in all games he has played - I disagree and think it would be a waste of valuable screen real eastate but after he mentioned it, many other people agreed so we will have to find a nice way to fit in one of those.
• No one went into the settings menu but they did test the pause feature in game play. This means we should probably get rid of the settings menu because it won't be used, this way we can also turn the initial display screen (main menu screen) into the level selection screen which will eliminate the extra click users normally had to perform before being able to play. I think it would be safe to migrate the settings options directly into the pause menu now, it can have master volume on/off as well as music volume and game sound volume sliders.

 

Github stinks, we moved on to Google Code

The reason we changed was not out of defiancy, but simply because one worked and the other didn't. We were instructed on what version control is, what Git is and how Github helps maintain a central repository but we were not taught how to actually utilise these tools in a multi-user environment and after many failed attempts with various online tutorials, we just grew contempt for the system. SVN with SCM in Xcode just worked perfectly for us with minimal work so we will continue on with that. Maybe in the future we will re-visit GitHub with the release of Xcode 4, which promises full Git integration.

Please check out our new repository at :

http://code.google.com/p/madtankteam/

If you have SVN installed, you can perform this to get the latest version of our works :

svn checkout http://madtankteam.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ madtankteam-read-only

If you don't have SVN :

Windows : http://www.sliksvn.com/en/download

Mac : http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/community/

??? : http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html

 

Regards,

Amrit

MAD Tank Team

Comments

[Beat]

"Github stinks, we moved on to Google Code" - yeah man, well done! Is it working inside xcode?

[Amrit]

SVN running perfectly inside Xcode (well, minor problems as you know but nothing like Git)! Thanks for suggesting that to us, Google Code is a very good resource.

[Tim]

Great update. Glad to hear you learned a lot through the usability process.

Sorry to hear Git was confusing. Definitely a failing on our part to effectively teach this. While I hear you that SVN is initially easier, GIT is the better tool. Experience will teach you this :D