Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
activity, you should inform your players to use the “think aloud” method. This is a common practice in user
interface prototyping. You instruct players to verbalize all of the decisions and thoughts that are going
through their minds as best they can. This gives you insight into what everything in your game is triggering
in players' minds. If a player sees a red object and is thinking it means danger (but it doesn't), then maybe
you need to change the color. Small details of what the mind is actively doing can expose flaws and/or
things that are successfully working in your game.
Once the game engine was in place, it was time to sugarcoat it. Since A to B is minimalist at its core, the
graphics needed to represent that. I chose to stick with few effects and basic graphics to embody this
theme. I believe this emphasized the point of the game, which was built on the basic concept of getting the
ball from one point to another. To make the game a little more alive, I added a soundtrack. I chose to
utilize the web resource
ccmixter.org
. This web site provides Creative Commons licensed music. Each
song on the site specifically covers how the song may be used; be it commercial or personal use, it is very
explicit. I found a fun and simple song called “Kindergarten” by a user named Gurdonark.
Post-production and release
Once the site was up and running, submissions to festivals and a little promotion was in order. Being a
novice game developer, I was unfamiliar with many of the available festivals. In the end, I only ended up
submitting it to two competitions: the IGF Student Showcase and Mozilla's Game On competition. I did a
small bit of social network promotion to get some foundational users as well. A few posts to both Facebook
and Twitter got friends and some random people involved. There are many other ways to promote your
game, but I was relying on the power of word of mouth to carry this project.
Reception
As of this writing, the high score on A to B is 1795 (see Figure 2-4). Sadly, I do not possess the high score;
although I am on the list with 1665. A perfect game would be an 1800. I still have not figured out how the
highest score was even possibly obtained.
In Mozilla's HTML5 game competition, A to B was a finalist. The game has also been featured on a few
blogs and HTML5 game sites, and reviewed on
playthisthing.com
. Within the first three months of the
release, it received over 10,000 plays. To date, 274 people have beaten the entire game.
