Lucky Day's Wizard War! for Android development thread

This game is fairly difficult. have died lots of times. Invisible wall right off the bat?! Reminds me of etrian odyssey. Still playing when I can. Will update later.
 
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This game is fairly difficult. have died lots of times. Invisible wall right off the bat?! Reminds me of etrian odyssey. Still playing when I can. Will update later.

the wall's been moved. its too much right after the bat IMO and too many to choose from.

run into any bugs?
 
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It won't run on my cell phone as it fails to install, however I have ample space. Not sure why. It installs on my HP touchpad and runs great, so far, nothing major but I would like to see more stats.
 
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Finished!

just doing a last minute playthru before I check out posting it on the store.
 
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LG LS670, planning on getting an LG G2 this Friday though so it should be fine by then. This current one is on its last leg.
 
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how old is it and what's the operating system? I should be asking that. The game is designed to run on at least 2.3.3 which means it should technically be able to run on 98% of current devices in use.

problem devices are more important to me at this point, if only so I can warn potential customers.

edit: looks like the OS out of the box was 2.2 so it wouldn't be compatible. Is that what is currently on it?
 
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I've been lazy lately and haven't played anything. I expect to mess around with the new version a bit over Thanksgiving as I'll be with a mass of relatives for a few days.
 
I want to post that build tonight to have it for Black Friday. I have another fix in it to try to solve your problem, so if you can take a quick test of that and let me know I would be indebted.

I have it drawing the the screen twice now.

If it doesn't work I can at least post that it was seen as a problem on your device. What's your OS version again?
 
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Not sure if you're asking me but my OS version is 2.2 I believe. I should be getting a new phone this Friday if things go planned right.
 
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hmm..last post disappeared.

yep - that's what I was looking sherwin. OS 2.2 is not compatible with the build.

--

On another note getting this apk up for sale is a new kind of pain. I should have expected this. All sorts of financial hoops to run around not to mention digitally signing the apk.

The apk was 60mb's and there's a 50mb limit on them on Google Play. You can host media files but I didn't bother figuring I need to work out new pathing. I found my largest single files were mp3's anyway and so I cut three of them down from 3-5 minutes to one minute. Shaved 7mb's off each of them.

What do you know: the apk went from 60mb to 38mb for some reason. Weird.

C'mon bank..Black Friday is almost here!
 
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Some interesting things happening since release:

I'm getting emails soliciting either my game for their app store or to advertise. One is kind enough to take $100 off and make it $199! I might ask if they have any sort guarantee. In sales I've even had my first ripoff of sorts. I won't say how but I will say I have motivation to create the "Lite" aka Demo of the game.

Getting it working for the high end Kindles has been a problem. The emulator has been a nightmare. Its so unbelievable slow that the game is unstable at any speed.

Intel (my current employer) and Google developed a solution last year but unfortunately my 3 year old box here is an AMD. We plan to buy a laptop soon so maybe there's a solution there.
 
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10 with one return :D

par for the course my co-worker told me. my brother thinks the game needs to snowball but I think with 700k apps now on Google Play its hard to stand out in the crowd. But QuestLord got 5k sales so I wonder how he did it. he's been absent from here, probably due to being so busy supporting his game ;).

I'm going to look at some promotional ideas over the next week or two, probably with Appbrain. They'll take 20c on every sale or such at a minimum of $25 a day.

Another is offering $100 off at $200 to advertise. Thanks pals!

Chillingo wants me to be super excited and send them my apk. They have a partnership with Samsung about distributing Indie android apps. Looks like they are owned by EA.

edit: three or four of those sales were from RPGWatch regulars. So once again, thank you guys.
 
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Not sure if I should post here on in the main thread, but anywho! I purchased the game 2 days ago and have had a bit of time to play around with it.
Really like the genre as it reminds me a lot of Decklens Mordor in many ways (most likely because that is one of the dungeon crawlers I played the most), and I am looking forward to test it out some more.

First thoughts without having read all the replies in this thread, some sort of character creation would have been nice but understandable not to have it I guess, since character starts of with 1 in all attributes.
The performance is very sluggish though as I am using a Samsung Galaxy S4 which should handle most new games easily, the game feels very laggy as I try to move around, not sure if its some sort of memory loss or something of that kind. I have also had a few crashes where the game crashes and I get the Wiard's grave app has stopped message.
I would love for some minimap to be there simultaneously while moving about because the level (for understandable reasons) is very homogenic in appearance and entering map and exiting it takes quite a while because the game runs slowly.
Sorry for the critique :) I am very excited about the game and am looking forward to trying it out further, however, my main impressions at the moment are that the game tries to achieve something in line with the gerne, however, due to performance I am not really able to get as much out of it as possible because it runs too slowly.
Also upon death it overwrote my most recent savegame, I am not sure if it is supposed to overwrite a savegame when it tries to reload from the autosave, but my latest save got overwritten by a fresh start it seems.
Will write more as I progress further, I thank you for your effort and look forward to give it a more in depth analysis.
 
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Hi Stavut. Thanks for the reply.

I'll take a look at performance issues. To compensate for a screen refresh issue I started drawing the screen twice. That maybe the culprit but I'll have to talk to Toff to see if the refresh has helped. If it hasn't I'll remove it and see if that helps. Either way I'll test performance on it again without it and monitor if there's a leak somewhere.

I'll also put this on an S3 to see how it works there. When I've recently tested on my phone too I noticed a performance issue that I hadn't seen before but I thought it was my phone just getting old since it seemed to be fine on my emulators and my Galaxy Tab 2.

On your savegame, death should only load your last Autosave and not overwrite anything. A Newgame from the start will overwrite your Autosave and only going up and down ladders and manually saving to Autosave are the only things that can change it.

Nothing should change your other Savegame slots. One way to check is the Savegame names are based on the timestamp. Either way, I'll have a look at this to see if I can duplicate it.

Do you recall where the random crashes are - that is, any details of when it happened? I think if you are online there's an opportunity to report it. I got one report from one user but have never had any crash reports since.

I apologize for the sameness of the walls on every level but I had to manipulate the textures into about 120 images by hand. Its a 2d game believe it or not. My plan for a sequel would involve drawing a wireframe through a vector and filling the vector with texture. If I can do this then I can have more variety of textures.



Sales have been pretty good this week. I got a few sales from Australia, the US, and Europe so I'm wondering how many Watchers wrapped up some Christmas presents. If so, thank you (which includes you Stavut). I think I finally broke even thanks to the holidays (given that, not including soft costs like my electricity bill, my entire out of pocket expense has been the cost to register as a Google developer).

—-

Bob McCabe suggested more variety in the actual game options. Over my vacation I think I've thought of a way to add quests to the system by putting a hook in the combat. That is, when the combat activity starts it would check to see if a quest can be implemented and check the state of that quest and implement a new activity. Combat would only occur if that hook is bypassed by the option or the quest activity passes an ok to fight result back to combat.

I'd like to add more character development but I'm at a dilemma how to do this. In the past I've floated developing an RPG system then tapping the game on top of it. It would effectively be a set of rules first. The initial core of the Wizard's Grave actually had the beginnings of a party system. I doubt I could implement it into what I've got now properly.

Looking into promotion Appbrain will only advertise free games for some reason. If I had in game advertising then paying them might make sense but it doesn't. Either way their recommendations were to reduce the size of the game, which I could do maybe by reducing some of the song sizes, making a free version (a demo), but especially, making it available to store on an sdcard which I thought it already could. Looks like I have to write a few lines on the manifest to allow that which will take all of 2 minutes.

This leads to my other thoughts for a sequel or an expansion.
 
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I double checked with my HTC Inpsire and Galaxy Tab 2 and neither of them had performance issues. So I stole my wife's Galaxy S3 when she while she was sleeping and loaded the game up on that.

Other than the default font looking great I immediately noticed the MediaPlayer wouldn't play any music. The sound effects were okay but the music refused to play and messages regarding the MediaPlayer were flooding the logcat.

I also noticed there were significant memory problems. Playing the game more and more to the external memory cap significantly (note previous post where this cap can't be reduced on external memory even when the active memory is cleared up). The external memory cap seems to be about 64mb on an S3 which is the highest I ever saw it. It went kablooie after that when it tried to go higher.

Something like this is probably going on on the S4 too. The OS is 4.1 so maybe an upgrade will help.

Question for Stavut: is the music playing on your S4? I also got a message on Google play if that was you. Thanks for that.

I also want to see how it performs when loaded to an sdcard but unfortunately she blinged her phone out and doesn't want to break the cover by removing it so I can't install it.
 
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Did some research on out of memory issues with the Galaxy S3. Apparently the issue has to do with the high resolution of the screen. Images that scale, which mine do, get scaled to a very high resolution and that's what takes up the memory. The auto scaling of background images for buttons and recreating the images as scaled bitmaps both seem to have this problem. I'll have to find some alternative. The odd thing is it doesn't seem to be a problem on an HDX Kindle which runs at 1280x720.

There were a couple of people that reported problems running music programmatically on the S3 but they were both playing files from the Web. Since I get sound from sound effects the difference seems to me running from a service. I need to investigate the S3 and playing music from a service (a separate thread).
 
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I played it today on my HTC One on the way into work. No bugs, it ran very smoothly. It's good fun, although I'm very lost at the minute and keep getting killed by kobolds! :) I'm still very early in - no spells yet, but I do have a trusty sling. Looking forward to seeing what happens as I progress (slowly!)
 
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Sorry for the late response and thank you for your work and in depth responses. Started a new job and been getting home too late to having done some real experimentation. The crashes I have experienced since, I have reported via the reporting tool on crashes, they seem to emerge when entering combat, specifically vs the wizards (not sure if that has anything to say, had them twice recently, otherwise all is in order).

Glad that you noticed the slowdowns and hopefully that can be fixed, the music is playing on my S4 but I didn't notice it too much as I usually play with the sound off, but I will have a round soon with the music on and see if be any inconsistencies.

The saving issue I reworked, it is if I set an auto save (save on top of an autosave) or something of that kind, and then die, it reloads to another game (I think the normal start) and when I tried reloading from there it would put me at the beginning of the game, I haven't reproduced that bug though, just that on death it starts in an odd different from my last save.
Will have some more substancial reporting soon as I will have a bit more time to play around with it.
 
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