It may come as little surprise, but it’s often the little things in game development that trip you up. The focus this week for Star Pirates Infinity is on QA of the code that’s been written the last few weeks. I was reminded of the importance of having a library of testing devices. An animation error was observed on one of our tablets, but testing the game on my phone, the bug magically went away. The cause was later determined to be specific to the aspect ratio of the device. There are so many different screen sizes on Android, we spend a lot of time retesting things that worked on one device to watch for unexpected results on other devices.
Despite all this, we have a third faction in testing now. We have the majority of the art created, although some will be revisited to make it better based on the ever improving skills of our art team as they spend so many hours involved in art creation. We’ve also been testing the game’s multiplayer connectivity to assure a seamless play experience.
For Badlands – Max Carnage, it’s a case of another week, another update. This week saw the launch of a new season in PvP as well as some improvements to combat ability animations. Our goal is for ongoing PvP competitive seasons. The current thought is a default one week rewarded season followed by a one week unrewarded PvP. We may also switch up some of the game mechanics during certain seasons so we can analyze the impact on gameplay. We expect that it will take data from a number of seasons before we find the right balance to make competitive play fun, challenging and balanced.
This week and next also involve some back end maintenance. We are switching servers for most of our games and this may cause some down time as new site addresses are propagated. We are making efforts to minimize the disruption and apologize if we happen to be down when you’re trying to connect.
And if you’re trying to find me in games lately, you can likely catch me in Star Pirates. I began Ascension 2 last week and got an initial bunch of points that I’m currently using to try and burn through the low levels. If you see me online, feel free to ask questions in the shoutbox. The other players are working hard to keep me in the yard so I usually have time to answer.