January 29, 2013
1/29/2013
I have sent Short Circuit for its third round of peer review. I feel confident that it will make it through peer review this time, and I look forward to finally seeing it on the Xbox Indie Marketplace where it belongs. During its second round of peer review it only got one review, and it noted that when the game started up, it expected input from the first controller for selecting which hard drive to load it’s saved data from. The reviewer said they weren’t sure if that was enough to fail the game, but I chose to pull the game back from review anyways. I’m not Microsoft, and I’m not going to knowingly release buggy software like they do. I’ve gone back through all the code in the game to ensure it no longer specifies which controller to expect input from. Now whenever a system dialog has to open I’m supplying the id of the last controller to provide input that the game actually used. Since there was no guarantee that the player has actually pressed anything by the time it comes to load the saved data, I’ve added a “Press Start” screen. I decided to make this screen rather plain an simple instead of going with the complex idea I had earlier so that I could publish the game sooner. Additionally, since I do allow the player to skip the company splash screen by pressing “A”, that action will now bypass the “Press Start” screen since it would no longer be needed. The last major changes I’ve made in this revision is to remove all the unnecessary references from the project, this caused the size of the finished program to be a lot smaller than it was. With its new, smaller size, I expect that everyone will be able to download the game fairly quickly even if they are on a slow internet connection.