Greedy Pirates - Device Testing

[Trevor Boyle]

Hi Guys,

Last night I launched 'Greedy Pirates' onto the market and quickly
found that the experience on my HTC Desire wasn't the same for
everyone. After spending the evenings of the last 6 weeks building the
game (using Replica Island as a starting point), it was a little
upsetting to see a lot of comments saying that it wasn't working.

I have just put up another version with images resized to powers of 2
and hopefully this will resolve a few issues (*newb*).

My question is, how do you go about testing for devices that you don't
have access to, and how do you go about debugging for them?

So far the only phone I know it works on is my own HTC Desire.

'Greedy Pirates' puts you in control of a pirate cannon.

Shake your phone to build the cannon's power, tilt your phone to
adjust it's firing angle and then blast the cannon ball as far as you
can, collecting a little treasure along the way.

http://greedypirates.trevorboyle.com/ - Sorry Chris for ripping of
your website and thanks for the code :-)

Cheers,
Trevor

[Bart Hirst]

Trevor, congratz on your game!  I'm sure there are some other suggestions, but the first advice I would give you is to release a private beta of your game.  You could upload the apk here so we can test it for you, or put a stealthy app in the store that only people you know would search for and download.  Or you could create a demo version of your application and try that first.  In any case keep the name of your 1st beta test application different from what you eventually plan to name it.  This way you can work the bugs out in your initial release, and then more confidently release something a little more official later on that (hopefully!) will get great reviews on the market.  It's tough though, you might want to read Chris's humorous blog post about the comments he gets on replica island.  It's a jungle out there!

[Trevor Boyle]

Beta version! Why didn't I think of that!

Just had a good laugh at the user reviews, thanks Bart.

I imagine that I will get most of the issues sorted eventually, and in
the end if it just makes one child happy... it will have probably been
a waste of my time :-)

By the way, can anyone get the game to display correctly eg. like my
youtube video?

http://greedypirates.trevorboyle.com/

[Alberto Rodriguez]

Yep..just tried your game out on my evo..worked perfectly.

Will try on my G1 and droid when I get home... Congrats on the release!

sent from my EVO4G

[Bart Hirst]

Works on my G1! I can test orig droid tonight

Sent from my Android

[Trevor Boyle]

Brilliant! Thanks very much guys!

I'm feeling a lot happier about the whole situation :-)

[Chris Pruett]

No problems on N1 running Froyo.  Power of 2 textures are required by pretty much every device, so if you found one that works without it, it's an outlier.

Pretty fun game, good work!  It reminds me of Nanaca Crash.  You should add power-ups and specials to make the bouncing part of the game more interactive.  But it works really well.  Nice job!

Chris

On Aug 13, 2010, at 8:15 AM, Charles Deisler wrote:

Works on my verizon droid perfectly..

[Andrex]

I thought this was about the piracy situation on Android! ;)

I have an ODROID-S, which is a fairly capable Android 2.1 device that
doesn't have the Market. I can test it on that if you post the APK if
you want.

Also congrats on your game! If I may ask, how "densely" did you work
during those six week? Every night? Every couple days? All day every
day?

On Aug 12, 7:15 pm, Charles Deisler <charles.deis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Works on my verizon droid perfectly..
>
>
>

[James Luzwick]

It works great on the droid x now! Great game!

On Aug 12, 2010 7:25 PM, "Andrex" <emailo...@gmail.com> wrote:

I thought this was about the piracy situation on Android! ;)

I have an ODROID-S, which is a fairly capable Android 2.1 device that
doesn't have the Market. I can test it on that if you post the APK if
you want.

Also congrats on your game! If I may ask, how "densely" did you work
during those six week? Every night? Every couple days? All day every
day?

On Aug 12, 7:15 pm, Charles Deisler <charles.deis...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Works on my verizon droid ...

> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 5:52 PM, Trevor Boyle <tpboyl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Brilliant! Thanks v...

[Trevor Boyle]

Thanks everyone! It would seem that the power of 2 textures have done
the job, now I just hope that the initial negative ratings haven't
stunted the potential growth. On a positive note, I have checked the
ratings this morning and I am now edging towards 3 stars, and a couple
of people have updated their previous negative ratings/comments.

@Chris, Nanaca Crash is all sorts of wonderful craziness. I think the
idea probably came from the Yeti Sports penguin game, or more recently
Monkey Kick Off.

I love the idea of power-ups, I think it does need a little more
interaction once you have fired.

I was also considering a Challenge Mode where you need to hit a
specific target or skim the cannon ball across the water 5 times, that
sort of thing. As well as a Campaign Mode, where you upgrade your
cannon with treasure you collect until you are able to reach and
destroy a castle (kinda like Hedgehog launch). I think I might take a
little break before I make any large changes like that though.

@Andrex, I have uploaded the lastest build for you here, if you would
like to have a play http://greedypirates.trevorboyle.com/GreedyPirates_v1_4.apk

I am a Flash (Actionscript) Dev , so writing Java isn't what I
normally do, actually this is the first Java program I have ever
written (at least for the 8 years since University). I like exploring
new technologies and API's in my spare time, so I thought I would give
Android a go. The first week, I dedicated 5 working days to get up to
speed with both Android and Java, and this week I spent another 3 days
getting it ready for market. Beyond that, I was spending maybe an
average of 20hrs a week, at a guess, which would include the weekends.
This time also included creating the design/graphics (most of which
were done in Flash, which is why it has that vector feel to it), which
is also a little outside my comfort zone.

Thanks everyone for the support and kind words,
Trevor
http://greedypirates.trevorboyle.com/

[Bart Hirst]

Trevor, I'm going on vacation with my family this week, I have a feeling greedy pirates is going to be a hit with my 6-yr old son, and I think the shake factor is probably what will do it.  Great work incorporating the motion sensors & vibrate.  I plan to break it out _just at that moment_ at dinner when his head is about to pop off, then enjoy the following silence :)

Bart

p.s. if you don't mind me asking how did you get the landscape / level to scroll like that?  I'm confined to the standard level size at the moment, I may need to expand / dynamically create or swap in the future.

[Andrex]

Thanks for the apk! It was really fun to play.

Also, thanks for the info. It's always interesting to me how much time/
when people work on their projects. Thanks again.

On Aug 13, 3:35 am, Trevor Boyle <tpboyl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> @Andrex, I have uploaded the lastest build for you here, if you would

> like to have a playhttp://greedypirates.trevorboyle.com/GreedyPirates_v1_4.apk

[Trevor Boyle]

Thanks for the nice message Bart, I hope your son enjoyed the game.

In regards to the scrolling landscape, I'm not doing anything
particularly clever.

On the update event, the time since the last update is passed into my
world view system. I use this value and the current horizontal 'speed
per second' of the ball to determine how far the ball has moved since
the last update.

I then loop through an array of value objects which contain the ground
bitmaps and there current vertical locations (and a few other things)
and update their vertical location based on how far the ball has
moved.

If the new vertical location would put the ground out of view, I
remove it from the array.

If the array falls below 3 ground textures (just a number I though
would accommodate all but the most super dooper wide screens), I call
an "add another ground texture" which adds a value object to the array
with a vertical location to the left of the last ground. I do this
kinda randomly, but it could just as easily be done based on a preset
level array or something. (I have a similar array for the coin
objects).

I then display all the ground objects based on their new vertical
positions... that's about it.

Hope that helps and gives you some ideas for your own levels.

Trevor

[Trevor Boyle]

Thanks Andrex.

[Trevor Boyle]

So... the users have been very slowly increasing after a big surge in
the first 2 weeks, where I got around 5k downloads, and I have been
quite happy with the general ratings.

I've been recently spending my time building a score board for
'weekly' and 'overall scores' and using the 'google app engine' to
store the data and deal with the refreshing of the weekly scores and I
am now ready to do an update.

But... my keystore has gone missing. I most likely deleted it by
mistake, but I can't find it in my recycling bin (I foolishly/naively
didn't realise how important it was. Lesson learnt.)

I know the details for the previous keystore... except maybe the date
of expiry.

I want to put an update onto the market, but because the new
certificate is different, it won't let me.

I was hoping that I could add an additional certificate to the current
published file so that it would accept the updated version with just
the new certificate. Similar to what is described here...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2881904/how-to-sign-an-apk-with-more-than-one-certificate

I skip the first line in the above, linked, description because it is
already signed through eclipse, but when I do the second line I get a
ZipException due to "invalid entry compressed size (expected X but got
Y bytes)"

Is there a way to put a second certificate on my apk?

Is there a way to recreate the original keystore from the information
I know?

I've also asked these questions in StackOverflow because I don't want
to accept that I will have to create a completely new application in
the market all because I foolishly lost a 2kb file :-(

[LouisB]

Trevor, how's it going, did you make any progress on this? It must be
something that happens often enough for google to address?

On Sep 29, 6:54 pm, Trevor Boyle <tpboyl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So... the users have been very slowly increasing after a big surge in
> the first 2 weeks, where I got around 5k downloads, and I have been
> quite happy with the general ratings.
>
> I've been recently spending my time building a score board for
> 'weekly' and 'overall scores' and using the 'google app engine' to
> store the data and deal with the refreshing of the weekly scores and I
> am now ready to do an update.
>
> But... my keystore has gone missing. I most likely deleted it by
> mistake, but I can't find it in my recycling bin (I foolishly/naively
> didn't realise how important it was. Lesson learnt.)
>
> I know the details for the previous keystore... except maybe the date
> of expiry.
>
> I want to put an update onto the market, but because the new
> certificate is different, it won't let me.
>
> I was hoping that I could add an additional certificate to the current
> published file so that it would accept the updated version with just

> the new certificate. Similar to what is described here...http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2881904/how-to-sign-an-apk-with-mo...