Ow My Balls! The game

It is a sad day in the land of Ow My Balls. Because of the memory management challenges we’ve decided to remove videos from the game. This was originally an important part of the game but now not so much so. Maybe that’s cause I’ve seen all the videos 50 times and they aren’t funny anymore. This is certainly disappointing, but with them the game is much more likely to crash, and we just can’t have that. The good news is that we can now share all of the videos we picked out here on the blog. So get ready for even more nutshot posts, starting with this – our absolute favorite, and the first one that you would have unlocked in the game.

Oh damn, it’s so good YouTube won’t let us embed it. So you’ll have to watch it
here.

So the problem started small. Every once in a while the game would double in speed. Then we dug deeper and deeper and finally found the root of the problem. I’ve failed to manage memory. I’ve been used to programming in high level languages like C#, Java, and Ruby where memory management is much less of a consideration. Here on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it’s everything. There’s apparently a memory limit that when you cross it the system starts to act all funky. It’s at about 22MB. So I guess that makes 22MB the new 640k. Feeling a little lost but hopeful we’ll be able to clean this up quickly enough. Some of the mistakes I’ve made are obvious, but others I’m going to need some help on. Everything is going to be OK. Really.

After a bunch of playtesting we decided that we really need to change up the positions of the buildings in the background. The initial area just has way too much open space and we need to fill it in. So Tim has made a heroic effort and completely reworked the backdrop in almost no time. Much respekt. Check out this video.

Whoever said that the last 10% is 90% of the work is wrong. It’s 99% of the work. That’s cool though especially when you’re making a game about people getting kicked in the balls. So we keep cranking like mad through the polish stage getting ever so closer to shipping. Our goal has been to ship this Sunday March 15th and at the moment we’re on track to making that happen. Can’t wait to get this out!

Got a lot of good feedback from the playtest about UI. A couple of the major points were:

• Score and points need to be bigger
• Get rid of buttons wherever we can
• Should flick to kick rather than use the power meter
• Replay should be on a post-game pop-up

So we’ve made a bunch of these changes now and here’s a video highlighting them.

The playtest went awesome. The best way to learn if your app is working or not is to watch people use it. Got a lot of great feedback and ideas from people. Some of the stuff was easy, some was hard, but the bottom line was people did like what we had so far. I’m going to be cramming to make a bunch of adjustments based on the feedback we got. Thank you to everyone who came and especially those who played the game for more than 15 seconds.

Pretty amazing progress for 2 weeks, don’t ya think?

Just got the first drop of character animations from Tim. Friggin awesome. Dropped them in and the game is way better. It would have sucked if we did the playtest with a stick figure.

Going balls to the wall for the playtest. Cramming like nothing else. By the way did you know that the statement “balls to the wall” is not actually in reference to balls? It refers to airplane pilots pressing the ball of the throttle against the wall of the front of the plane.

Here’s another video update….

So the playtest is tonight. We’re close to ready, but I’m cramming like mad on the code. So many little polish things that need to get done. Super excited but at the same time nervous. So begins a long day of coding and testing. Fingers crossed.

We’re facing a difficult decision. Gotta be serious here for a minute. Early feedback on the game seems to indicate that the backdrop is not wide enough. The original idea was that the character would fall more height wise than width wise, which is why we went with a thinner backdrop. But watching people play and getting feedback it seems that people expect it to be wider. Twice as wide in fact. Expanding the canvas is a tough decision because it means more objects, more collisions, more everything. But if it’s needed it’s needed. This is a really tough decision and we’re going to have to talk about it and think about before diving in.

Tim and I spent the day working together on the game at his place. Made monster progress. Lots of objects placed and animated now. The object animations are looking friggin wicked and the game is actually starting to be kinda fun. Check it out for yourself in the latest video.