PicsWars.io devlog #5: 08.09.17 - 15.09.17: Final features and a tutorial!
Hello again!
This week was big. The game finally has everything that’s needed for the game to be complete. Well, at least, that’s from the current perspective ;]
At the beginning of the week, I’ve improved game performance on both frontend and backend about 3x times. Now the game loads and responses much faster, hopefully, you’ve noticed that already. The initial cause for the server's slowness was that I focused too much on premature optimisation which resulted in a worse performance. Oh, the irony! About the frontend: I just had to switch certain Phaser settings and it went all right.
Next, I’ve rewritten squares hovering. Previously, the information about the hovered square was displayed in the corner of the screen, which wasn’t very intuitive. Now, the information about the square is displayed right under when you hover it.
What’s more, now the players are able to add a link to any page to their territory! This way you’re motivated to capture more squares: people will click your link more often if they see it more. This is great if you’re an entrepreneur or a community member: you can use PicsWars to promote your thing!
Next, when the player runs out of turns a social sharing window is displayed for them. Neat! Please share the game with your friends, it’s more fun that way!
But, most importantly, we now have an interactive tutorial! The previous tutorial wasn’t used by the players because it presented all information at once in one huge wall of text. Now it gives information in small portions and waits for a player to complete certain actions before proceeding further.
Hopefully, this will help with the game’s main problem right now: understandability.
Next week, my goals are:
- Launch beta!
- Gather feedback.
- Fix whatever breaks.
We’re getting close to a release, hooray!
Thank you for reading so far! I will keep writing devlog every Friday, so stay tuned! I will be very grateful for any feedback too! Check out PicsWars.io in your pc!
P.S. I am open about my development, so here are some links:
- https://twitter.com/cbrwizard game’s and my personal updates
- https://github.com/cbrwizard/picswars.io/projects/1 my Kanban board
- https://github.com/cbrwizard/picswars.io/issues game’s bugs, tasks and ideas (you can post yours there too!)
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FaEH9uGHclU7EP48r5yh0g0kDvDJJVGwatis7qzoBsc/edit?ts=59788122#gid=0 all recorded feedback
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10g08fzcSSYjplOD_hQP6i-lcjCvzGSY3YEfZBW_p5TY/edit#gid=2025177204 tech measurements
