Droplets Frozen?
3/27/2017
The Kickstarter campaign failed miserably. I blame that on myself entirely. I should have done much better with the video. I should have done a lot better writing the game’s description. I should have been a lot more active in advertising the Kickstarter Campaign. Either way, there is a lot for me to learn from this failure. Now that it has failed, I’m actually kind of glad that it did. This allows me to take my time with developing it further since I am no longer bound by a self imposed timeline that I set forth in Kickstarter. I’m also glad because I’ve found a major issue with the development tools that I will have to work on and test out further. When I build the game install it on a newer Android device, it works great! However, if I try to install it onto an older device, like my 1st Generation Kindle Fire, the game crashes as soon as it starts. At this point I haven’t yet determined if that is because of my code, or if its a problem with my development tools. In full disclosure, I’m using Game Maker Studio Professional to build this game, and I suspect that I won’t be able to produce any titles for the older Android devices using it. I will be doing some rudimentary testing tonight to see if this is the case. If it is the case, I don’t know what I’m going to do about it yet. I don’t relish the idea of releasing Droplets only for newer devices, as that kind of limits the total market. I’m a bit loathe to rewrite the game in Java, and I’m also not feeling the idea of paying for other development tools. (I did pay nearly $800 for Game Maker.) As soon as I’ve done more testing to determine what the exact problem really is, I’ll post back to let you know. —–UPDATE—–
Basic experimentation shows that Game Maker is capable of compiling a game that can be run on my 1st gen Kindle Fire. This is good because it means that I was wrong in my suspicions and will be able to develop my game for most of the Android systems currently on the market or in use. Unfortunately this also means that there is something wrong with Droplets that prevents it from being loaded on other systems. I would say that its not working on systems that it wasn’t previously installed on, but I already know that to be wrong. My wife has it installed on her phone, and even installed it on her mother’s phone too. In both cases the game loads like its supposed to. This makes me think that maybe some of my startup code is not compatible with some older devices.