Crashblock - Open Beta test.

[jasonf]

I've packaged a new version which includes the locale issue.
it also fixes a few other problems which were discovered.

Please let me know how you get on.

[jdarling]

Haven't downloaded the latest version, but the previous version (the one from yesterday) ran just fine and my wife is a complete addict. She says you need a version for the WII so she doesn't have to switch back and forth for games. LOL

Good luck at IGF, your up against some stiff competition.

[jasonf]

Thanks matey.

The latest version fixes a few things but it's not a critical update. It's essentially an update so that people from Germany and Denmark (amongst others) don't have to download an additional patch if they've not previously downloaded. it does contain other fixes but nothing serious. There'll probably be another one tomorrow.

I'm really happy that your wife likes the game. I've found that women like the game more than men (mostly).. I don't know why, I tried to keep the game as neutral and kid friendly as possible (which is why there's no death in the game.. even when you're hit by a block, Jenny just falls.. She's not dead, she appears back at the top)

I'd love to get it working on the Wii, but I fear the costs to make that dream a reality would be prohibitive.

As people find bugs, I'll stomp on 'em keep the comments coming.

[pstudio]

I've found a bug in your game. Sometimes when Jenny climbs down from one block to another and then climbs down again she magically climbs down from air. I don't know really how to explain it, but I've managed to take a screenshot of it.




Also if I run from right to left on some blocks and there is a hole Jenny jumps over the hole, but if I run from left to right she starts climbing down :?

Btw. Great game.

[jasonf]

Oh Man pstudio, why'd ya have to go and mention THAT bug?

Good news is, I fixed it

It was one of the final issues with my environment state machine. A few tweaks here and there and I'm fairky confident that I've fixed it.

[cairnswm]

Bere are some comments on what I found good/bad/irritating in the game

1. I really like the menu system, but in the main menu some of the menu blocks actually move when mouse overed instead of just changing image, and many of the others actually have a different shape (just the corners maybe) as they change, I find this quite irritating
2. Help Menu - I wanted to go back and read the previous screen but the 'Back' button took me to the menu again! This was after I decided I didn;t want to read the help and wanted to go to the 'Menu' and couldn't find a way to do it.
3. The About menu has a 'Next' to go back to the Menu
(Maybe I was just looking for some consistency on the way buttons were used. I expect to go back a page, next to go forward a page, next at the last page to take me to the current menu etc)
4. There is no way to 'Cancel' a registration screen.
5. What does 'Quit to the OS of your choice' mean - can I quit CrashBlock and go into MacOS - on my windows PC - How?

In Game
6. Sometimes I found it difficult to position the blocks, if I moved 1 block left and called the crane, the crane moved two blocks. I'd suggest always positioning a specific block of the crane directly over the player.
7. A few times I suddenly died, I mean as in busy playing and there I am dropping in on the screen again and I have no idea why I died. It wasn't blocks dropping on me but something else and I still dont know what it was.
8. The blocks drop from the top - out of screen, but the crane is showing blocks on screen, why dont the blocks drop from where they are on the crane?

9. What is the difference between "Register your copy of the game" and "Unlock your copy of the game"?

10. Some of the text in the help screens needs some editing, there are occasionally spaces missing between words, and sometimes new lines where there shouldn't actually be any.

11. Alt-F4 does not close the game.

12. On the final splash screen there doesn't seem to be a timer to close the game - it waits for me to press close the game But I have already said Quit, and Confirmed it. So why must I do it again. (PS. Games that do this to me I dont buy - maybe a personal preference but I wont buy a game that expects me to press Quit 3 times before I am out). Part of my job as a system designer is to make sure people get what they want with as FEW clicks as possible....

13. I like the character animation, but found moving around the play area very sluggish. I think a faster moving character would be better (personal preference maybe?)

Well done and good luck at IGF

[jasonf]

Wow, this is the stuff

OK, I'll tackle these point by point. I'll raise issues in my task system.
If you find something irritating, I'm damn sure someone else will too.

1. The menu system graphics are sometimes 1/2 a pixel out, this is partly to do with an exporting issue in Xara. I've made some progress sorting this out. Did you use yesterday's build to test? There was a fix to the menu graphics which tried to minimize this issue.

2. Help menu, Agreed. There should be consistency.. next button should be next, previous should be previous and there does need to be a 3rd button to take you back to the main menu.

3. Same as 2, I'll probably use a new Main Menu button for this. There are other areas which would also benefit from this clarity.

4. Cancelling the registration screen.. Not really thought about this as an issue. But it wouldn't hurt anyone if I put a Back button on there.

5. I could be a bit cleverer about this and put Quit to Windows or Quit to Linux, it'll just be constants after all.

6. The positioning of blocks is something which I spent a long time trying to solve. The biggest problem is that some tetris shapes have an odd number of columns (when rotated) and others have an even number. it's the even numbered shapes which cause a problem as there's no way to center the shape over the player while snapping to the grid without biasing one side or the other, so I opted to bias on the direction the player was facing to allow for an extra element of tactics which the player could learn. Perhaps this needs to be better explained in the instructions. If I just biased in a single direction, I feel that I'd soon have people asking to bias on the other direction.

7. This is worrying.. I could do with more examples of this. If you're being killed doing normal things then I need to pay particular attention to this. I trust there were no bombs going off at the time? It's not the actual bomb blast that kills you, it's the particles which fly out from them. There is the possibility that you were catching the Del key, which forfeits a life to place you back at the top of the arena.

8. I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean. The blocks drop from the crane. Holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse up will let you see the crane. The blocks on screen are a ghosted preview of the crane's current position. Perhaps this is something which needs to be properly explained.

9. Interesting point. Noted. I'll try to make the terms used here uniform. Unlock and Purchase. Register is something else, we don't register.

10. I've made a little progress here. I will investigate further but if you could give specific examples, that would help.

11. Agreed, Alt+F4 should close the game.

12. Agreed, the user shouldn't have to click too many times to quit the game, or do anything for that matter. I actually hate quit-game splash screens, some are dreadful and put me off buying too, but they're a part of every shareware game I've seen. I'll make it a bit easier to close and put a timer on there. Once unlocked, that splash screen is no longer seen. There seems to be a tricky fine line between showing sales information and not annoying the customer to be found.

13. Perhaps I'm, just used to the speed which the main character moves. Was it the animation being sluggish or the whole game? The game should be running at 30fps and the animations should play at the same speed on all modern PC's. it was a design decision not to have an unrealistic movement speed and to give certain moves a small penalty to get people thinking about alternatives. I didn't want a Mario style system of movement, I wanted more of a flashback system. Flashback does have some moves which are fairly ponderous.
More experienced players should be able to move around the arena much faster than new players as they'll have discovered the subtle extra moves which can make the player leap about the level quite quickly. But if you can pinpoint an area you found to be particularly slow, I could try to speed it up. But I do have to balance the animation speeds for the moves. If it's too fast to climb up a block, then no-one will bother jumping. Also, the movement speed is closely related to the feeling of tension in the game. Changing it too much could completely alter the feel.

Thanks again for the comments, they are incredibly useful and the support, it is appreciated. I will be trying to get as many of these issues resolved for the next build.

Cheers

[Huehnerschaender]

Again bad news. I just downloaded Crashblock again and now I get an EConvertError with dates. It says '2007/10/22' is not a valid date.

It still seems as if you do not check all region settings and change it properly.

But another question is: Why does it want to convert 10/22 ? We have the 17th today...

[jasonf]

Oh no, Sorry about this Huehnerchaender.

Region settings are the bane of my life! Dates are the worst.

Oh dear... quite why Delphi has global variables to handle this I don't know.. I should just be able to set a locale for the entire app and have done with it.. one thing .net got right.

Still, never mind. I'll fix this later on and re-upload.
the reason for this error was I was trying to unlock the game for everyone until Monday, when it would revert back to shareware mode. Possibly not the best decision in the world on retrospect, but I thought it would be a nice thing to do. But there's only so much clear thinking that goes on at 3am, obviously I was in greater need for sleep than I thought.

Monday is the day it goes on sale so obviously I didn't want it to remain unconditionally unlocked.

Thanks for testing this for me, I'll fix it as soon as I can as a matter of urgency.
I'll also have another think about how I can unlock the game for testers.

[Huehnerschaender]

ok, just drop a note if its up.

Downloading from your site is a pain in the ass.... 36 MB at 12kb/s is quite a bit of annoying