Critical Evaluation

Tydee has been designed and produced as a mobile game playable for Android. In the project planning phase, I decided to make a mobile game application as “mobile gaming has become an essential market targeted by competitors in associated industries” (Yu-Shan et. al, 2016). The artefact that I have produced is somewhat a cross between a game and a short interactive story. Players are required to make actions, complete tasks within the time frame (which is the challenging game part of it) and the speed of their actions will determine the outcome of the “story”, whether or not Mum comes home happy.

The project is inspired by personal experience. I used to find myself rushing with adrenaline, quickly getting chores done when I hear my mother’s car drive into the porch. I decided to turn this into a fun game. The very phrase “it’s just a game” implies that playing a game is a form of practice for a real-life challenge (Koster, 2005). If games are essentially models of reality, then the things that games teach us must reflect on reality.

Thinking about game design, I looked at existing artefacts on touch screen devices. The two that are taken as inspiration are the Nintendo DS game Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine and the Dumb Ways To Die Mobile Game. I spent a great deal of time on every aspect of this project from the visual illustration, to programming, to audio implementation. I kept the illustrations simple, and made sure that every interaction and button within the game works and gives players a good experience. Unger (2012) states that in mobile game design, the vision statement of the design tends to be simpler – with more focus on gameplay rather than world-building or storyline. This is not implying that story and world-building are not important in mobile games, but the very nature of mobile games means that the player will not be as forgiving of issues with gameplay mechanics.

According to Tekinbas and Zimmerman (2003), creating meaningful play is the goal of successful game design. Meaningful play in a game occurs from the relationship between player action and system outcome; it is the process whereby a player takes action within the designed system of a game and the system responds to the action (ibid.). The actions required in the game Tydee are basically completing all the tasks and the system then responds according to whether the player achieves this before or after the time runs out.

With guidance and support from my supervisor, as well as the opportunity to scout the internet for tutorials, I have gained a lot of knew knowledge and skills in the process of making this project a reality. Applying interactions that I’d never worked on before, it allowed me to explore and discover what else is possible in game design and development. I believe I have successfully realised the ambitions I had at the early stages of planning the project. Everything works exactly as how I had imagined and I am quite pleased with the end result. The main objective for making the game is fundamentally to give players an enjoyable experience. This was observed during the user-testing stage when majority of the players that tested the game expressed their joy while playing.

However, looking at Koster’s (2005) list of ways boredom might strike, killing the pleasurable experience that games are supposed to provide, I realise that Tydee holds the tendency to do so. The ones relevant and possible for my game are when the player thinks the game is too hard, because they fail to see any patterns (i.e. don’t know what to do, where to tap), or on the other hand, when they master everything in the pattern, exhausted the fun, consumed it all and have nothing else to look forward to.

References:

Gamefaqs (2016) Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine [online] Gamefaqs.com. Available at: http://www.gamefaqs.com/ds/944949-iron-chef-america-supreme-cuisine [Accessed 26. Jun. 2016].

Koster, R. (2005). A theory of fun for game design. Scottsdale, AZ: Paraglyph Press.

Tekinbaş, K. and Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of play. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Unger, K. (2012). Game development essentials. Clifton Park, N.Y.: Delmar.

Wilks, P. (2013) Must Play Game – Dumb Ways To Die. [online] Bluestacks.com. Available at: http://www.bluestacks.com/blog/app-reviews/archive/dumb-ways-to-die.html [Accessed 26 Jun. 2016].

Yu-Shan, S., Wei-Lun, C., Chin-Tarn, J.L., Han-Chao, C. (2016). The effect of flow experience on player loyalty in mobile game application. [online] Sciencedirect.com. Available at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216303764 [Accessed 26 Jun. 2016].

 

 

Final additions, debugging – Complete

I added another scene for when the whole game has been successfully completed. I also added a background music to this scene which shows that the user has reached the happy ending of the game.

After this scene, the button leads back to the main menu. Unfortunately the background music at the main menu doesn’t seem to start now. I coded a simple play function for the bgMusicChannel but now it doesn’t stop when I tap “play”. I’ve tried a lot of ways to prevent this from happening but I have not succeeded.

During the final tests I noticed another error. The error is that if the time runs out when the player is at the kitchen hob scene, it goes to the kitchenFail frame but this happens:

I discovered that the problem is that when it jumps frame, there is no removeEventListener. I added this to the fail frame however it causes a lot of other errors. I spent quite a few hours moving around the code and editing it but it just made things worse. I believe the issue can be resolved however to my disappointment I could not solve it. This problem only occurs when the player is at the hob scene when the time runs out. Hopefully it won’t be too big of a problem.

My project is now complete. Here are some screenshots:

 

Background music debugging

I met up with my supervisor Ian for help with the problem of music re-starting over the music that is already playing on the main menu, when going from page to page. This is the code that fixed the issue:

More sound and alterations

I added more sound to my project. Some of them were edited on Adobe Audition to make them more suitable. For example, some sounded a little too crisp and harsh, and also too loud compared to the rest. I adjusted the volume accordingly. Some of the sound clips also needed some trimming. I also played around with the Stretch and Pitch feature as well as using the Parametric Equalizer to modify the sound when necessary.

I have another issue now: The background music in the main menu keeps repeating and multiple layers of this music is played when I go back to the page from the credits and instructions page.

I also noticed that the timer wasn’t working at the kitchen when the game is played for the second round. I added secondsToCountDown = -1 on the white button right before the kitchen frame. This seemed to do the trick.

Coding Sound

I’ve received three sound files which are loopable beats created by my friend. These beats consist of the hi-hat and bass of drums. Since I haven been given three, I will use one for each room. Earlier I also requested if he could use one of those beats and add some guitar and/or piano melodies to make a music soundtrack for the main menu and other pages like credits and instructions. I’ve received this as well. It sounds great. I knew I had to use code to put in the sound instead of dragging it to the timeline as there is much more control this way. Since my app has a lot of drag and drop and wiping functions and not just basic tapping, I knew I couldn’t just drag the sound effects from the library into the buttons, but had to code them in. I looked up some tutorials to refresh my mind on how to code sound in AS3.

I placed the above code into the “bedroomStart” frame. I have coded such that when the played taps on the screen to go to the bedroom scene, it triggers the sound to start playing. I made it loop endlessly (until a stop function is triggered) by putting int.MAX_VALUE in the second parameter of the play function. I applied this to the other sounds as well.

 

References:

Multimedia Tutorials (2013) Actionscript 3 Sound Basics. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjT9yWeR6_Y [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

flashgameu (2007) Playing Sounds in Actionscript 3.0. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZpwppe7yGs [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Avelx (2008) Flash Tutorial Working With Sound. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdIV3pUfGzA [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Rayme Pastore (2012) Flash Cs6: Adding Sound AS3. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuYqzYrNHEw [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Stackoverflow.com (2012) AS3 Playing Audio and Looking It. [online] Stack Overflow. Available at:L http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13017035/as3-playing-audio-and-looping-it [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Blue_Chi (2010) Playing Sounds with AS3. [online] Republic Of Code. Available at: http://www.republicofcode.com/tutorials/flash/as3sound/ [Accessed 15 Jun. 2016].

Extra elements

I felt that the living room looks a little empty and something needed to be added. I have create a potted plant to put at the corner and animated it a little bit so it doesn’t look so static. I’ve also added another interaction in the main living room scene: a frame on the wall. The frame is initially tilted so the player has to tap on it to fix and straighten it. I’ve also made that there are only two areas on the floor where the crumbs are and these need to be tapped on as well and they will disappear.

I also put all the false statements in the “start” frame for each room instead of the “fail” frame because this seems to work better.

Almost done (visually and interactivity-wise)

I applied the same code to the other wiping interaction in the game which is the kitchen hob. This works the same way as the window wiping scene in the living room. I got a few errors at first but managed to get rid of them by altering the code a bit. The wiping works perfectly now! I then added more things in a few scenes to enhance the experience: added a “tap to clean” movie clip at the coffee table scene in the living room so users are clear that they only need to tap to clean the spill and crumbs. I initially wanted to have the user manually wipe it but now as I have found out, it’s quite challenging especially when there are already other interactions on the same screen like drag and drop, so tapping it would do.

I’m also looking for more sound effects and a background music to put in. I downloaded the sounds I found earlier, kept looking for more and downloading those I might possibly use.

I still feel like nothing I’ve found gives the exact mood I’m looking for, to use as the background soundtrack. I then resorted to asking a friend of mine to help me make the background sound for the game since I don’t have any music software and I felt it would be too late to download and learn it all. All I have in mind is a simple percussion beat using just the hi-hat, without the drum bass and snare which gives a feeling of rushing but not too loud or heavy. He was happy to help and said he will try and give me some samples within the next few days.

 

 

Wiping interaction

I emailed my supervisor Ian for help yesterday and met up with him today because I just could not figure out the wiping code on my own. He helped out by adding a line in the code and adjusting some numbers. The system, however is only able to take into account the height and the width of the “cleaned” surface, and not the entire area including the middle. This means that it will work if the user starts cleaning up from the middle and then slowly going outwards, or if they clean from one side to another, or top to bottom. However,if a player were to drag their finger across the screen vertically and horizontally, or “draw” a border around the area specified, the system would still take it as all the dirt has been cleaned. Not exactly how I want it to work, but this is good enough.

 

Timer & Wiping code

I met up with my supervisor for a tutorial session a few days back. He managed to help me fix the timer function and it’s now working properly. Because of the if(secondsToCountDown < 0), the timer only works when it is set to secondsToCountDown =-1. This line needed to be put in the previous frame, in the button that goes to the main scene frame so it would start counting down.

Next we took a look at the window wiping. We used getColorBoundsRect, took a look at some numbers in the output panel and tried figuring out what they meant. I looked up online tutorials to help me understand the code, starting from the basics.

References:

Zanzlanz (2013) BitmapData in Actionscript 3. [online] YouTube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z46XFrwArJ8 [Accessed 3 Jun 2016].

linkage (2009) getColorBoundsRect in transparent Bitmap. [online] Snipplr. Available at: http://snipplr.com/view/18603/ [Accessed 3 Jun 2016].

User testing

I used the time of the exhibition (during the opening night) to do some user testing. My application for ethics approval was accepted and approved on February 29, 2016; Protocol number: CTA/UG/UH/02264. I watched people play and made some observations of my own, and I also asked them to write their thoughts in the “feedback book” which I provided. The users who tested my game were mostly my coursemates.

At that time, only the first and second scene were complete, both without timers (this made it impossible for them to lose the game, but still had to complete the tasks to move to the next level) and the third kitchen scene was still under construction. The “instructions” and “credits” page were still empty, so I had to explain to them briefly what the game was about and what they had to do.

As I stood next to the players and watched them play, I noticed:

1. How they don’t easily know where or what to tap on and what to drag and drop, which might need some improvement.
2. Their reactions of happiness and satisfaction when they get to clean things up, which was very pleasing.

Some verbal / written feedback:

1. “Cool game! I feel like I’m cleaning my own house”
2. “This is so satisfying”
3. “If only tidying up was this fun”
4.  “Great game, but needs menu”

 

By the looks of it, people are enjoying my game so far. A minority of them wasn’t sure what to do on some scenes. I will make some changes to this to ensure they have a good experience.