Wednesday 18 June 2014

Beta Testers Wanted

Other than saying I'm still here, I'm blogging to see if anybody out there has an Android phone or tablet...

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

In the end, I had no choice. It was either buy a new drive or give up any serious hopes of ever again using this PC. I've also taken a deep breath and started to draw new cartoons, with the determination that I'll now store them in more than once place, even if it means doing as Leg-Iron wisely suggests, backing things up to DVD.

And after a day of struggling to get my new WD drive into my machine (and, for the first time, I've stuck fans on it in the hope to prolong the drive's life) I've now reestablished the basics of my work environment. After my email and browser (how many people must use Internet Explorer just to type the word 'Chrome' and then never us it again?), I also managed to get Unity up and running. Getting back to Unity has been the thing I've been eager to do since the crash on Sunday.

Late last week, I'd reached the stage where I've started to canvass thoughts aboutt game. I was delighted when the usual cynics I've shown it to were surprisingly positive and offered a few good (and the odd not so good) suggestions. This week is about putting these final touches to what will become Version 1.0 of the game which I aim to get onto the Play store before the end of the month, though that's a big ambition when I still need to implement a tutorial system.

Which brings me to my offer, which I doubt will be taken up by anybody out there but I'll make it anyway... If anybody fancies acting as a Beta tester of my game, then please drop me a line (via the Contact page or my email). You only need an Android tablet or phone and a willingness to lie and say that you've been reading my blog for a long time and would love nothing more than test a ridiculous game. At this stage, I just want to know if the game actually runs on a variety of hardware other than the Samsung phones and tablets I've had access to so far.

I wish I could afford to pay you but this is the internet and none of us get paid for anything we do but I will promise to include a juicy credit in my game's acknowledgements screen.

You'll also get a chance to be the first people to get to play the game, hear my bad guitar fingerpicking, voice acting, and (possibly -- yet undecided -- singing). At the very least, it should be a mildly amusing distraction from all the horrors of the world and, really, isn't that all we can hope for?

6 comments:

  1. […] The Spine has one he wants tried out. […]

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  2. […] Friend of this blog would like your help please. […]

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  3. In a former life, I was a professional software tester. However, my limited exposure to Android leads me to the conclusion that in my professional opinion it's at best flakey and at worst as bad as Microsoft.

    I wish you luck.

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  4. I understand your doubts but the reality of my day to day dealings with Android leads me to prefer it enormously to anything by Apple which might be easy to use and look great but is always telling me what I can and cannot do. Yes, there's some very flaky stuff out there for Android but that's a problem with Android being relatively easy to develop for and too many really low quality apps flooding the market.

    However, that's somewhat beside the point. I'm programming in C# within Unity and the finished game could be compiled relatively for iOS, Windows, or a few other environments. The fact I'm targeting Android is simply because I use (and love) Android and I'm not going to blow £100 to get an Apple developer's license (even if I had a Mac from which to compile the Apple code).

    All that said, this has been more an educational exercise, though I hope the finished result isn't too shabby.

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  5. Ah, that's pretty neat. Just installed it and it's a bit like having the kind of automatic updates you have on Android but on your PC. I'll have to see how well this works. Thanks Kit. ;)

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  6. I'm glad you like it. I know it's a little bit embarrassing to admit, but I get a little bit excited when I use software alternatives to programmes that I didn't even realised I disliked. There was a time when I used WinZip and Adobe Reader because I hadn't put any thought into it. Anyway, I'm enjoying your game - I'm very impressed. I will have some notes, but I don't think they will be soul destroying.

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