Bitongo » Indie Life

What’s going on with Bitongo and Soctics

Gable — Sat, 26 Jul 2014 14:29:24 +0000

I was shocked when I realized the last blog post we published here is more than a year old. Time does fly when you are busy! We are alive and well, in case you were wondering. We’ve decided last year to balance client work and own product development. It’s a precarious balancing act at times but it seems to be working out very well so far for us.

We create all kinds of mobile and web apps for clients; we are not talking about games here but business / utility apps. As clients usually want a ‘mobile’ app and not an iOS app anymore, we decided to go cross platform with Xamarin. It’s a great choice as it gives you the ability to still publish native apps on different devices instead of dealing with HTML5-based ‘solutions’.

We are also creating our new game in Unity which means finally we are going cross-platform with games as well! Stay tuned for that, it’s coming soon!

So many of you have been asking about the Android version of Soctics.. believe me, nothing would make me happier than having it already available. We’ve started the porting actually a long time ago but for various reasons we are always hitting one wall or another..

However, we haven’t given up on bringing Soctics to the world outside iOS. We’ll port it with Unity and hopefully still this year a significantly bigger audience can enjoy our competitive turn based football game

After the Unity port is complete, we’ll be able to introduce some new stuff in Soctics but it will have to wait for now. Mostly we are talking about some iterative changes and probably some cosmetics, nothing that would re-shape the game. We are pretty satisfied with how the game feels at the moment.

That’s it folks!

Extreme App Makeover: The Evolution of Soctics

Gable — Thu, 31 May 2012 17:17:01 +0000

We originally debuted Soccer Tactics in 2009 on the App Store and a year later we introduced online multiplayer in it. Our users really liked the game but we felt there was so much more in the game we haven’t explored yet. Last year in November we started out to create a mega-update with a total app overhaul, here is what happened.

We gathered the numerous user feedback we received during the years and we discussed them about how we could incorporate the changes suggested by the users. Although we haven’t implemented everything, we used their feedback a lot during building our new features list. The original game was iPhone-only and we wanted to introduce an iPad version as well so we decided to create a separate binary for the iPad and keep the original for the iPhone. This is the historic reason behind not going universal.

We decided we lack on the following major fronts:

lack of customization of team colors
poor graphics
poor sounds
online mode is not deep enough
AI not challenging enough

The first two points got handled by our new graphics design team. Have a look at thebefore / after images below

Graphics aside, the sounds proved to be another big task as well. We implemented an AI for the crowd that would react to events during the match, like a big goal save, a nice pass, etc. This increases the ambience atmosphere tremendously but it is not a simple thing to implement properly!

The online mode got re-written from the ground up using Erlang. F3r3nc is supposed to write about his experience with this system soon. Right now we provide our own matchmaking for friendly matches and official, ‘league’ matches as well. Implementing our own solution has the multiplatform support advantage over simply just using Game Center, although we did integrate GC as well for achievements and for friendly challenges.

We also started experimenting with new gameplay changes:

kick-off mode
new player types
improved control mechanisms
ball prediction: show where the ball lands at the end of the turn

The final result is essentially such a changed game that we had to release it as a separate product because our original Soccer Tactics players wanted to keep the ‘classic’ version alive and intact as well.

Especially the new feature called Binocular which predicts ball movement seemed to be a game changer. The feature is great as it gives players more control over their attacks but we did not want to upset the balance in the game. We decided to limit the number of binoculars to be used during the matches. These binoculars are consumable items that players can receive when they are playing online and there is an option to purchase them as well. We put emphasis on the mechanics of receiving / spending binoculars so it is not mandatory to use the IAP options at all.

We now look at Soctics League as the evolution of Soccer Tactics, putting our experience and feedback into the successor and making a superior product in all sense. We are very proud of it and can’t wait to meet you all online!

You can check out our official website for Soctics for the trailer and the download links.

About Beta Testers

Gable — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 22:38:17 +0000

After an admittedly long absence from our allotted iDevBlogADay schedule, I would like to share my thoughts about the difficulties of beta testing. We have conducted a few beta tests in the past for iOS products and I am beginning to understand the underlying problems that probably many other dev teams are struggling with: beta tests are simply not effective enough. Yes, we have great tools to push test builds to prospective testers (like Testflight), so the technological hurdle is gone. The much bigger challenge is finding the testers who can give you real, useful input over a sustained period of time.

We are currently in the middle of the beta test of our latest, greatest game and here we have a unique case: we are in the process of doing a total makeover of our earlier game, Soctics. Fortunately for us, we have managed to involve a few fans of the original game to beta test for us. I admit this is not a common scenario for most developers so I won’t analyse this delicate case deeply, but very briefly the situation is:

Upside: They are already familiar with the original game so they require less instructions for testing, and as they are already loyal to the game they are very enthusiastic
Downside: Easy to alienate. As the users got used to the original feature set, there is resistance from their side when feature changes occur (opinion is often going to be biased)

As for why we are doing a total makeover for a game that has been on the store for more than 2 years, that’s a different story and it’s worth its own blog post. So it’s great for us, we have enthusiastic players who have been using our game for several months, some of them even for more than a year (how common is that in the iOS app ecosystem, I wonder?). But what about when you are creating a brand new game?

Your Developer test device quota is so precious because of the restricted number of devices you can register, you really have to think carefully how you spend them. Let’s say that you start blogging about your fancy new game, even posting some photos / teasers / early gameplay trailers. If you do it properly it will give some insight into what the game is really about and you will get some initial excited applicants who seem to be very excited about testing the game for you. We have done a beta application form for Fontify last year with Google Docs, it was fairly simple and easy to distribute, I can heartily recommend checking it out! So the next phase is picking the best candidates for your beta purposes based on the answers they gave you on the application form. Perfect! You’ve got the 5 / 10 people you were looking for, the testing can begin!

You share the first test build on TestFlight, everyone is madly grabbing it. Then you wait for the results. And then wait some more. Finally, a couple of feedbacks start trickling in. Some observations won’t be news to you, there will be some bugs you have overlooked.

You create a few more builds and you will exponentially get less and less feedback, it’s like the door of a treasure vault is closing before you are able to go in and grab the things you want.

In the end, you won’t get that much information from the testers. You can then go and get a second batch of people and try to squeeze some more data out of them and then you decide that OK, beta is finished, now lets release the game. But is your game really ready to go before the public? Is it really giving the best first impression it can give? Is it really well balanced, enjoyable, easy to use? Does your game simply suck? Maybe. It could also happen that you have not found the proper people to show it to.

How can we expect to optimise when we select a bunch of random people out of nowhere?

I think beta testing needs much more planning than most people realize.

Distinguish several beta phases
Specify explicitly what has to be tested in each phase (eg. Phase I: singleplayer core gameplay, Phase II: multitasking support and multiplayer issues, Phase III: additional gameplay elements (eg. more advanced units/buildings/, bigger maps, more difficult puzzles etc.)
Find the best people for each phase: don’t accept just about anyone for beta testing. Most iPhone users will not even be aware of the true meaning of it. Testing != playing
keep the beta intense, stick with a pace, keep new builds coming and give immediate feedback to every tester who sends you a bug report / improvement suggestion

Testing != playing. Keep that in mind when you are sorting through applicants who are accustomed to using one of the most refined electronic devices ever made. Average iOS users are not used to testing and trying to break things, sending bug reports and thinking about improvement possibilities because when they came out from the Apple Store with their new phone/tablet, they’ve bought a “magical device”.

I believe that separating phases and then allocating the best people for each phase is the way to go. How effective were your previous beta tests? Do you have any insights to this topic? Let us know!

Building Games vs Building Engines (aka. Engineeritis)

Gable — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:52:39 +0000

Recently I have been thinking more and more about the question: what am I really doing when I’m writing code? Sure, we have been developing iOS games since 2008 so the answer seems straightforward, but if I stop and take an honest look, the answer is pretty astonishing. Most of the time I’ve spent with coding has been spent with creating our own little ‘engines’, and then dropping in the gamecontroller classes, polishing them a bit, then release! If I could talk to my younger self, I would definitely talk him out of building engines, maybe even emphasize it with a slap or two, and here’s why.

In most of our 2D games we used OpenGL and you might know what that means:

Creating your own framework for sprites, frames, entities, animations
(particle systems)
if your game is level-based, some kind of map data structure
map editor (it would preferrably be a separate product, easy to use etc.)

What if you need some physics? Nothing fancy for sure, just some collision detections, maybe bouncing here and there… Oops another couple thousand lines? What? You’d like to have a stable physics which is not juttery, does not depend on frame rate and all that kind of small-text-details stuff you only recognize you need when you are already knee-deep in… your own physics engine code? Sure it’s almost done so lets finish it anyway! Oh, 1 month passed already? Wow!

The list could go on and on. It’s impossible to estimate properly how long writing your own engine will take if you don’t have considerable experience in it already, and do you really want to spend so much time on it? Every time you re-invent the wheel, you are wasting precious time of real game development! If it takes for you to develop a game in 4 months and during that period you were building an engine in the first 3 months, what were you really doing? Wouldn’t it have been better to learn to use existing tools in a couple of weeks and then focus on the game aspect for 3 months instead of 1? The real value is what the users will finally experience in the game, not the fancy code you have managed to create to solve mind-boggling low-level technical problems!

I have fallen into the building engine category too many times. I think too many people fall into this category. Maybe it is an engineer hubris, we take pride in our work, building something from scratch sounds great because we feel we are not depending on any middleware or already existing tool and we will be able to create the perfect little engine that our app needs. I do not believe that anymore. We are going to create limitations in our own engine no matter what and we will manage to accept those limitations happily.

Most of the devs are not supposed to be building engines but should use the existing ones and even if they would hit some limitations on the engine side (maybe this is more of just a simple fear than a real fact), it’s still quicker to find workarounds in an existing system.

So what’s my advice really?

When problem-solving, stay as high-level as possible. When I’m talking about problem-solving, I am talking about creating prototypes. Best ones would be that would work on paper, just grab a pen and a scissor and start creating your game! If that’s not feasible, go with a language you are very comfortable with and can code very quickly!
When you have an amazingly solid game mechanism, choose an existing tool / engine that would cover the biggest subset of your requirements
The technology part is just 1 aspect of a game, it is not the game itself! Even if you hit a limit with a chosen engine, ask yourself the question: does this limit really affect my core gameplay? Is it crucial from a user experience point of view?
Don’t reinvent the wheel! I’m begging you! All the energy you’ve put in your own physics / rendering / sound engine should go into gameplay balance, elegance, rewarding systems, player immersion, storyline, character design etc!

I am not saying there are no cases where writing everything from scratch is a bad idea. I am saying people usually overestimate their needs / underestimate existing tools and focus on things that are, essentially, a waste of time.

So which one are you? Are you an Engine Dev, or a Game Dev, really?

The pain of international iTunes Gift Card giveaways

Gable — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:31:06 +0000

Today’s iDevBlogADay entry is going to be part rant and part hack. As any small dev with a tight budget, we are also continuously looking for wallet-friendly new ways to engage our audience. Recently we have decided to give away iTunes Gift Cards for a few of our users who responded to our announcement. We thought it would be a simple and quick way to engage them in some interaction. We could not have been more wrong.

The Problem

Simply put: if you purchase a Gift Certificate in one store (eg. US store), it can only be redeemed in the same store. Forget about giving it out to users in other countries!

The Rant

The harsh reality of constraints the wobbly ugly giant called iTunes enforces on us is appalling to me. I am pretty sure the lack of flexibility is the result of an old and monstrous backend designed for the music industry in mind 10 years ago and the App Store architecture is still sitting on top of an outdated backend which is just being stuffed with more and more modules over time and eventually becoming utter chaos. We might see a slow separation of the App Store from the rest of iTunes like we see on OS X, but I think it is going to be a very slow and cautious transition. So if we don’t want to wait 5 years to give out those Gift Cards to our lucky winners, what can we do?

I have called Apple to see what they would say about the possibility of sending Gift Certificates to people using other stores and their official response was that it is not possible. By the way, I don’t know if you have called 1-800-MY-APPLE recently but I’m pretty sure their automated clerk is also a Siri implementation, it’s worth a try I was laughing so hard it was so ridiculous to me.

it announces happily that he is a robot and able to understand full sentences so we should talk to him properly
you talk to him, and then you will hear a pre-recorded sound of someone typing on a keyboard. Apple is really trying to give you the impression there’s a real rep sitting on the other side of the phone. It was so absurd for me I really couldn’t help start laughing. Some people might prefer this fake environment where we imitate a more intimate human-human interaction but if you start your conversation with an I AM ROBOT announcement then don’t try to make me feel like you are human, you insidious digital entity! From a technical point of view though, I believe this few-second sound is a necessary delay because in the meanwhile your speech is being analyzed and put into context, a huge database is being queried and then a proper answer formulated. Much like when Siri “thinks” about your answers on your phone.
it finds a few keywords in your sentences and tries to interrogate you along those lines
it either manages to give you a satisfactory answer or just redirect to a real human being (in my case this happened)

So after this little intermezzo I was talking with Apple’s reps and although they were super-polite and friendly (really, any company training customer service personnel, you know where you should look for examples to follow!), they weren’t able to help me with my problem.

The Hack

Looks like the options to solve this case will be unofficial, even might be frowned upon. By reading various forums, I saw reports stating it is possible to buy a gift card in a specific store, then asking the beneficiary to use the gift card to register an account in the store of purchase. I really don’t like this approach because from a user’s point of view it’s a lot of hassle, and we are forcing him to create an additional account for the sole purposes of using their gift card (not to mention forcing him to break T&C rules by providing a fake address for the new account). Then his purchased items would belong to that account and not his regular one… Not a way I would choose for sure. Might be a good bullet point in a How To Alienate Customers blog post though.

Summary

After spending several hours on research, I still haven’t found a proper way to do international iTunes Gift Card giveaways. Have you done it successfully before? Is there any way to facilitate such campaigns?