This is an
old, decrepit thread but rather than start a new one I'm going to tack a post on the end of here since it's relevant to the subject. My friend and I have been working on Chicken Boom on and off since it went up originally last February, and in December we put up a site just for our Flash games that I posted about
here. Chicken Boom is by far our most played game on the AAGH Game Center.
Since it was originally made, we really wanted to do a Chicken Boom for mobile devices. It seemed like it would be a natural fit, but it wasn't until this month that we got it to a point where that can happen, and in fact it will happen. On this coming Wednesday, January 28th, we're launching Chicken Boom for Android. We would love to do an iOS version but we lack a Mac to build it on. To prepare for the launch I made a new page just to promote Chicken Boom.
http://games.e-aagh.net/chicken-boomChicken Boom for Android is going to have some improved graphics over what is now Chicken Boom Classic (the web version), high score leaderboards and achievements to unlock, plus we have plans for regular updates that will bring new twists and features to the game. We have modest expectations for how Chicken Boom will do, but we're looking forward to getting that ball rolling.
The hardest part, aside from waiting until Wednesday, is the testing - my friend and I, plus a few testers, are playing the
out of the game to see how it holds up and so far it's been solid and stable. I will relate to you a funny story from testing, because I like you guys so much.
About a week ago we had a major issue. The game's performance was being halved about every 500 points and for the life of us we couldn't find the issue. It didn't happen during testing on our PC, and it didn't happen on the dev phone we had, but it happened every single time on our normal phones. Every 500 points the FPS would halve and lag would kick up. After a full night of bug testing and a scare that the game was going to need a major overhaul of some sort, I nailed it down to our Google Play Games integration causing it.
I was just about the reluctantly pull that support when I took one last look at the code and saw the issue: I have loops running during the game that check for achievements being unlocked. They were picking them up accurately, and one that we were testing at the time reliably happened around every 500 points. The issue (anyone see it yet?) was that while they were catching the achievement's event occurring and submitting the unlock, there was no checks on the loop, so once it fired it would continue to fire once a frame until you quit. After an epic facepalm, I added checks so they would only run once and voila, the problem was solved.
Long story short: Don't overlook simple solutions, and remember to keep track of what's running when and where in your game.
Anyway, like I said Chicken Boom comes to Android devices on Wednesday, and I'm looking forward to seeing what, if anything, comes of it.
