Don't Leave Bad Reviews If...

... the issue can be corrected.
Just wanted to share a recent experience I had with a game I downloaded from the Amazon App Store onto my Kindle Fire.
One of my favourite Facebook games is Monster Busters (I know, I should be working instead of playing games), so imagine my delight when I saw that it was available on the Amazon App Store. Off I went and downloaded it. Whilst downloading, I read the reviews that had already been posted, most of which were fairly negative, because of an issue with logging into Facebook. Still, I’ve read things like this before and not had problems with other apps, so I carried on with the download.
Unfortunately, the comments made were right. The game would not access Facebook, and it needed to in order to sync with my account.
However, rather than leave a negative comment, on what I was sure was a good game, just with a slight issue preventing me playing it, I contacted the makers of the game, PurpleKiwii, and reported the issue. After all, a negative comment can, and does, affect future sales (I know this is a free game, but it’s still not nice to have negative reviews on any of your projects).
The next day, I got a email back from PurpleKiwii, thanking me for my report and letting me know that the issue has now been fixed and available on the Store.
So, what I have to say is, please do not leave negative feedback straightaway if the issue you have is a bug or failing feature. It may be that something beyond control of the developers has changed (I’m not saying that it is the case in this instance, but it is a possibility). It is equally possible that something may work on the developers machine, but for some reason doesn’t work on others. Things DO slip through testing processes from time to time, it’s a way of (developers) life. It is much better to report an issue to the developer and get them to fix it, rather than do without the product all together and leave a review that could impact on the developers future sales.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say, and thank you PurpleKiwii, 10/10 for customer service, but you have now halved MY productivity as I do ‘just one more level’.

Wow! Seems like months since I last posted anything here.

Oh, wait. I HAS been months!

So, what have I been up to in the world of programming?

Well, I have begun work on some new games under the Krazy Pengwin Games label. I'll post some more news about them soon.
I have switched game development language to Monkey. This is also by Blitz Research, in fact, it can be seen as the little brother to BlitzMax, but it has a neat little trick that BlitzMax did not. Whereas BlitzMax was cross platform, allowing me to compile to Mac, Windows and Linux, Monkey goes even further. With a single source project, I can create games for, not only the desktop operating systems, but also for Android and iOS. Monkey also supports XNA, but I'm not too interested in publishing to that platform right now. So the upshot is, the games I am working on will also be available to mobile user, firstly Android, but hopefully iOS by the end of the year.
I'm still using RealStudio (now called Xojo) for in house tools, but not much in the way of commercial applications. Once my new web site is up and running, I will be making some, if not all, of these tools available for free download.
Well, that's it for now, so just watch this space for details of new games and stuff.

Comment About Comments

After posting my last tutorial, someone made a criticism, or rather an observation, about the coding style I have been using. I will be the first to admit, they are quite right in what they said, too.

I failed to use any comments in my code. I should have commented. No matter how small the piece of code you are writing, it is always advisable to put comments in your code. This can save you a lot of time in the future, especially if you haven't worked with that piece of code for some time. Even one line of code can cause a programmer to stop and think, if it's not too clear on it's function.

So, my apologies to all. From now on, I shall ensure that I place adequate comments in the code, as well as the explanations of the code function in the blogs.

New direction

Well, it has finally happened. I have succumbed to the lure of the mobile market. I spent the last week teaching myself to program games for Android devices.

It turned out to be easier than I was expecting. Apart from getting my head around the Activity lifecycle, I thought it was quite straight forward.

This does not mean that I will be abandoning desktop platforms, I am hoping to produce desktop and mobile versions of future projects. I will also be looking at applications that will use both desktop and mobile devices in tandem, but more of that at another time.

As I am talking about mobile devices (actually, I'm typing this on my tablet), I have begun to use Evernote to store code snippets. This service, available at http://www.evernote.com, is a marvellous way to synchronise data between devices. I whole heartedly recommend checking it out.

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