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Playerio – Why it might not be the Best

Mar 252012

Playerio Logo
Over the last few years, specifically since June of 2010, I’ve used Playerio as the backend for Game Development Room (GDR). Its been a great ride. I’ve enjoyed a lot of the features it offers and have made heavy use of the free account which has allowed developers to connect for so long.

Unfortunately, the great service has some not so great qualities. We’ve had our fair share of downtimes and bugs. While those could be expected and dealt with just fine, the latest issue has left GDR with many annoyed developers. As some basic background, this thread outlines the initial report of the problem and administrator responses. The bug was reported on March 11th, though if I recall correctly, had been appearing for a day or two before that. The first admin response came 5 days later and was just a “we are working on it”.

Sure that’s fine. If your response was actually the day after. When your whole service is experiencing the bug how could you miss this for so long? Seems interesting. I don’t mean to say they should be paying attention all the time to their service but once daily should be minimum. And quick acknowledgement has always never led to anything bad. The fix was rolled out three days later, which was sort of ok, considering it was the weekend and all. However weekends are when devs get the most traffic.

The fix didn’t work. Three days later an admin posts that they are working on it and will get a fix ASAP. It is depressing to me that it takes 3 days to realize that your bug fix didn’t work. Shouldn’t this be tested almost immediately and tested the following day(s) to ensure your fix worked and stayed working?

By now, its the 24th. Only 2 weeks after a bug report was made and a fix hasn’t come through. Playerio isn’t very appealing to me anymore. A friend from GDR recommended Gamooga. If Playerio keeps it up, it may be well worth investigating this service.

As a conclusion, I mainly wanted to outline one of the downsides of playerio. They’ve gotten plenty of good rep from a lot of sources (including me!), but its important to recognize the parts that are lacking with their service.

What Profusion Has Been Doing…

Games, Mother, Other, Ruby Star No Responses »

Feb 102011

We’ve been incredibly busy working on a variety of projects. Here’s a quick list of what we’ve been doing.

Unnamed Penguin Game
– Brayden Black, Unnamed Developer, David Arcila
Jump around on platforms, doing your best to not impale the cute little penguin on the spikes above or fall to a perilous death below.

Game Development Room [GDR]
– UnknownGuardian

Hang out with other developers in the GDR on Kongregate, to get help and give help. Working on version 2 which will be a lot different from version 1.

Sudoku [Pics soon]
– UnknownGuardian, David Arcila
We want to get into Android development! So bad! So we thought, we need a simple game. And whatever we have done isn’t simple, so we’ve got to pick an already made simple game to force ourselves to make it easy and figure out how to work with Android. We’ve begun creating the game based off existing source code to reduce development time on the AIR platform for Android, using FlashDevelop which really helps the AIR building. A lot.

Unnamed Platformer [Pics whenever graphics get made]
– UnknownGuardian, Brayden Black, David Arcila
As a team, we have been looking at the platformer idea a lot. We enjoy platform games as a whole and its a great idea to start working with level designs and tile based games. We tried to code our own engine, and got pretty far, but we’ve ended up using some existing code to help speed up development time a lot, again. Its got a basic engine so far, with a tile made world, but that’s about it so far.

Ruby Star [Pics in former posts]
– UnknownGuardian, David Arcila
Its up for review by the FGL team finally, which will help us get final feedback for the game before released to sponsorship. Since we didn’t end up getting lots of feedback from FGL users, we’ve gone ahead and put our game in the queue for staff pre-review feedback. We’ll implement the feedback for sure (they know what they are doing) and get the game reviewed and bidding as soon as possible.

Unnamed Multiplayer FPS [No pics]
– UnknownGuardian
Haha! I wish this project would go through, but its not, probably. I spend a good while trying to understand the basis and how stuff worked in Multiplayer real-time games, involving what data to send and when, as well as techniques to remove visual lag like extrapolation, interpolation, etc. If you guys saw my thread on Kongregate, it goes into a lot of detail. I’ve got a very basic top down prototyped that was modified off existing source code (again….) since it used a lot of unfamiliar techniques that I’m not even ready to learning how to program. Currently handles player movement and shooting. A purely fun-driven learning experiment.

Mother 2 [No Pics]
– UnknownGuardian
Spent a few days looking at ways to expand Mother 2, but what I was looking at turned into an incredibly complex project that doesn’t seem similar to the original game much, so I dumped it. I’d like to go back and re-expand on Mother some time. Source code for this game (Mother, not Mother 2) should be up sometime soon, even though its not good source code and was slapped together in 24 hours for the FGL competition.

Mochi Interview with Toge Productions

Games, Other, Other, Sponsorship No Responses »

Dec 192010

Mochi had an interview with Toge Productions a few days back. The interview was a live video feed, a powerpoint presentation and a chat room. It lasted a good hour and ten minutes, and none of it was worthless. I fully enjoyed the interview, in its very analytic detail of their games. In case you missed it Mochi provided a copy of the powerpoint, audio, and a chat log. You can view the event recap here, which contains all of those.

In addition to Mochi’s recording of the event, I also did a recording (9 recordings actually). If you find Mochi’s video boring since its just the powerpoint with audio, go ahead and check out the screen recording playlist here, which has the live video feed of Toge Productions, as they speak about their presentation, with the powerpoint and chat included in the videos.

How To Make Target Practice: Part 3

Actionscript 3.0, Games, Other, Target Practice No Responses »

Nov 132010

The Actual Game
Part 1
Part 2

This section is about reporting the destruction of the target back to the game class and about other game logic that is going to be going on. Go ahead and open the four classes we have created. We are going to be mostly focusing on the Game class today, but keep the others open for reference.

How To Make Target Practice: Part 2

Actionscript 3.0, Games, Other, Target Practice 1 Response »

Oct 312010

The Actual Game
Part 1

In this section of How to Make Target Practice, we are going to take a look at (and of course code) the destruction of targets and a simple particle system. Remember to check out the source of this game’s inspiration.

If your .fla and your 2 classes, Game and SquareTarget are not open, go ahead and open them up in your IDE.

How To Make Target Practice: Part 1

Actionscript 3.0, Games, Other, Target Practice 1 Response »

Oct 302010

The Actual Game

So as I stated on my 2 hour game project, here I am with part 1 of I don’t know long the series is to make the game. Perhaps it will only take one section, but I’m thinking about splitting it up. Check out the source of this game’s inspiration.

This tutorial is going to be written using Adobe Flash CS4, from which the original game build was made in. However, I’ve on purposely made it so it would be incredibly easy (and almost the exact same) to be written in another IDE such as FlashDevelop. Everything but embedding a font in your .swf should transfer over flawlessly.

So lets get started in this part 1 of a series on how to make the game: Target Practice. Before beginning however, I am assuming you have a copy of Flash CSX or a similar IDE and you are somewhat familiar with it already, so I won’t have to get into much detail about using the IDE.

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