Help test my game?

[Yossarian]

Hi all,

I've been locked in a cupboard for the last year, working on a game for schools to help teach about hygiene microbes and antibiotics.

It's almost finished and I've been testing it in schools.

I've been having performance problems with the game and would like to have some feedback from you fine folks.

If you have a spare 10 minutes, please have a look at the game and give it a shot. Please note that I've had some problems with the game when I use Firefox and Chrome. For reasons as yet unknown (and to my shame) it works best in IE.

There are 5 rounds to the game.
Each round has a number of levels.

I think it's getting slower after each level.

There is a FPS counter at the top left.
Could you please post here and tell me roughly what FPS you were getting in the platform game rounds?

If there was one round where it dropped sharply, please also tell me.

[Danny]

I did the blind round and it all went fine, in the game round it says 50 fps, but as far as I can tell, there is nothing I can do and I am stuck on this screen with a lo of blank orange space.

[Nugget699]

Originally Posted by Danny

I did the blind round and it all went fine, in the game round it says 50 fps, but as far as I can tell, there is nothing I can do and I am stuck on this screen with a lo of blank orange space.

What he said.

[k0ruptr]

got the orange screen in firefox, then tried IE and it seems to be advancing correctly now

[Yossarian]

when orange screen thing happened, what browser were you using?

At that point in the game, it loads a text file that defines the level. Something seems to go screwy at that point when you're not using IE.

[Danny]

Firefox

[SteveMax58]

Tried it out...I use IE. I played the entire game end-2 end (very nice BTW).

My FPS starts out in the 30's and ends up in the 10's. I couldnt quite peg precisely when the drop happens, but the first platform game, it dropped from the 30s to 10s for a moment when the blueish glowing object was brought up on the PDA...as soon as it went away, FPS went back up. Also...on the 2nd or 3rd platform round...one of the round brown bacteria couldnt be killed by the soap (he just kinda remained stationary and I had to go around him).

Also of note...in the question round (the one where it shows whether you got questions correct) the last question in the round does not reveal whether you got the answer correct (positive for 2nd to last rds, 50/50 on the 1st rd of q's as I only noticed in the 2nd rd of q's).

[Marc Vaughan]

Very nice (esp. the question rounds imho).

There are a few UI issues I'd suggest altering slightly:

* When selecting a player to control (ie. boy or girl) put something on the screen telling the user to click on the character they want to use. Yes its 'obvious' but someone won't do it ... trust me
* Similarly have a help icon or similar in the arcade game section to bring up the controls used and objective (someone will forget them).
* When you photograph a lurgy have big fanfare to show you've done it and also have text displaying saying '1 of 3 lurgies photographed' or whatever.

[fantom1979]

Blind round worked great for me, ask stated by others, got stuck on the orange screen in Firefox 3.0.11

[Yossarian]

Hi guys, thanks for the comments. I'm working just now so will comment properly later.

I just wanted to say that I'm aware of the Firefox issue. I don't know why (I thought Flash player would behave identically on all browsers), but Firefox seems to think the level definition file is loaded before it actually is, causing the game to try to draw a level with no content.

I've seen the game work on Safari and Chrome (but not always) but the safe option at this time is IE.

[fantom1979]

Originally Posted by Yossarian

the safe option at this time is IE.

just kidding... keep up the great work.. from what I have been able to play, the game looks great.

[Yossarian]

Originally Posted by SteveMax58

Tried it out...I use IE. I played the entire game end-2 end (very nice BTW).

Thank you :-)

Originally Posted by SteveMax58

My FPS starts out in the 30's and ends up in the 10's. I couldnt quite peg precisely when the drop happens, but the first platform game, it dropped from the 30s to 10s for a moment when the blueish glowing object was brought up on the PDA...as soon as it went away, FPS went back up.

Yes, the 'portal' is far too expensive. The portal was the exit point of levels, but I've changed it to a basic fading blue oval. I missed the portal inside the pda.

I'm starting to think that slowdown doesn't have all that much to do with code inneficiencies. I noticed today that the slowdown persists into the quiz round. The platform game is definitely not running at this point so the computational load should be minimal. I suspect that I'm doing something REALLY DUMB with my artwork.

Originally Posted by SteveMax58

Also...on the 2nd or 3rd platform round...one of the round brown bacteria couldnt be killed by the soap (he just kinda remained stationary and I had to go around him).

Ah, that's a bug. After your comment, I noticed that it happened today during a playtest so I took over and had a fiddle. It seems that the microbe does die and isn't harmful to touch, but its animation is interrupted (and it changes state) and it doesn't know to make itself disappear. Thanks for the tip, I'll add it to the (large) list.

Originally Posted by SteveMax58

Also of note...in the question round (the one where it shows whether you got questions correct) the last question in the round does not reveal whether you got the answer correct (positive for 2nd to last rds, 50/50 on the 1st rd of q's as I only noticed in the 2nd rd of q's).

Correct and well spotted.

Thank you for taking the time to play the game.

[Yossarian]

Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan

Very nice (esp. the question rounds imho).

I think all of the credit for the quiz should go to the artists. I got really lucky on this project and hired two friends who normally wouldn't be available for what little we paid them.

Nancy Lai - who did all of our characters and microbes, used to work on Hello Kitty and now is doing a work-from-home intense animation course with the hope to get to a Pixaresque level.

And

Sandy Beveridge who did just about everything else and now works at the Guardian.

Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan

There are a few UI issues I'd suggest altering slightly:

* When selecting a player to control (ie. boy or girl) put something on the screen telling the user to click on the character they want to use. Yes its 'obvious' but someone won't do it ... trust me

This happened today actually. I had a playtest with 6 10/11 year olds. One of them sat and sort of stared / waited at this screen for over a minute before he realised it required input.

Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan

* Similarly have a help icon or similar in the arcade game section to bring up the controls used and objective (someone will forget them).

A reasonable suggestion, although I'm beginning to doubt that's enough. I think it would be a nice and easy fix, but I wonder how many actual 10 year olds (the target for this game) would open help. Their teachers / parents might I suppose.

I've actually found from playtests that almost NONE of the kids actually read their objectives or read the controls.
They all go for the arrow keys and the space bar but on the first level, I want them to use the CTRL button to take photographs. I'm starting to think that having two 'fire' buttons isn't a good idea in this game. You don't really need them both all the time so I'm thinking about just using spacebar. Today, only one player read the instructions and knew how to take photos. The others jumped around like nutters throwing soap at everything in sight, only to complain when they got stuck at the end of the level and had to wait for the timer to count down.

I didn't expect them to be particularly attentive, but even my most conservative assumptions have been proven wrong. Nobody reads anything.

Which, of course, isn't their fault. It's my job to satisfy their needs, not their job to fit mine.

Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan

* When you photograph a lurgy have big fanfare to show you've done it and also have text displaying saying '1 of 3 lurgies photographed' or whatever.

Yup. Good idea.

[MikeVic]

I got 60fps, but then couldn't do anything after the blind question round. Seems to be a Firefox issue as mentioned already.

I agree that making the character select screen stand out more would be good. Maybe a glow around the character currently selected (and default to one of the two), or an arrow above them.

[Fidatelo]

I agree, the FPS seems to go down during the games. I started out at about 50, but seemed to end each game at about 35.

Incidentally, I got stuck on the 3rd game where I had to stick 3 bacteria's into milk to make yogurt. On the last glass I accidentally knocked the bacteria thing off a ledge the other direction, and then couldn't get it back up towards the milk, so I was basically just trapped in the level from what I could tell.

[MikeVic]

On the character select screen, it looks like they're screwing if you leave your mouse over them for a bit. They make these "O" faces and bounce around a lot.

[Racer]

Around 30 for me by the end of the 2nd game.

Also, fell off the edge that game and couldn't get back on the ledge.

[SteveMax58]

Agre with the plan to change from using CTRL to just using SPACEBAR throughout the game. It added a slight bit of confusion when I got to the second platform round.