January 24, 2013
1/24/2013
Short Circuit went through the second round of developer testing and got absolutely no reponses. Operating on the idea that for every one person who posts at least 5 others played the game, and upon the concept that most people will only post if they find something wrong, I then sent the game for peer review. It sat in peer review for a week until it finally got a response. A single minor bug was discovered that forces the player to use the first controller when selecting the hard-drive. Since I don’t want to be known for releasing a bugged game, I pulled it back from peer review. I was trying to avoid having a “press start” screen that you see in so many other games, because I feel they are rather tacky in a one player game. I’ve been trying to build the game to work with any controller, by polling for input from any controller. In places where I have to specify what controller to use, I simply specify the last controller from which I recieved input. The problem is quite simple really. When it comes time to select a hard drive, the player may or may not have actually pressed any buttons on the controller. If the player hasn’t pressed any buttons, then I have no way of knowing what controller to pass to the hard drive selection process. I had the thought of not calling on the hard drive selection process until after I’ve recieved some sort of input, but this presents another set of problems in that the player’s volume settings won’t be loaded for the main menu. It’s very important that the player’s preferences be observed, so this isn’t really a viable option either. The only option left that I can think of is to have some sort of “press start” screen like all those other games present. I’m going to make mine a bit different though. To avoid the volume preferences, it won’t have any music or sound effects, instead it should just be a visual thing. The title of the game will be in the center of the screen. Behind the title, the screen should be filled with a random playing grid. This grid should cover the whole screen and be functional. Every second or two a button on the screen should be selected, and it should be “pressed” simulating the actual game. Whenever the player presses ANY button on ANY controller, the game should then trigger the hard drive selection screen, then put the player at the main menu. This actually has an added benefit of showing the player how the buttons interact with each other, kind of a reinforcement of the tutorial.