I have a game that is ready for release(on jgo), but could use some more polish(still a few bugs). So my question is should I release it now or polish it up a bit more first? The few bugs that I have are:
-Sprite rotation is screwed up
-Still too much memory usage
-Other stuff’
by the way if I do decide to release my game do I have to release the entire netbeans project folder or just the jar file and my images folder.
Thanks in advance
How important are those bugs? Do they impact gameplay? If it’s a huge disadvantage to to not see where sprites are facing, or you have a memory leak that crashes the game halfway through then you should definitely polish it more. The biggest question is if you’re ready to receive criticism about your game. If the bugs are too important, that’s all people are going to notice.
You can even release your game as a single .jar file with all the images inside it, or even a jar wrapped in a .exe file.
The way my game is coded, I load images from a folder, and that’s one of the things I could polish, but I’m fine with that. I’ll just release the folder with the images and .jar file, since the bugs aren’t too major.
people are very lazy. If they have to do anything more than double clicking a .jar or a link to an applet, you’ll lose like 90% of your test players.
You should make this process seamless as possible if you want to get decent feedback. If you don’t bother packing it nicely why should we bother moving folders around to make it work?
About your first question, it depends on what you want achieve with your game. If it’s just a “first game to test my skills”, i wouldn’t bother polishing much. Just be sure to have people testing everything you want for you next “serious game”, like deploying, playing sounds, image loading, etc, anything that has a chance of failing on other people’s environment, so that your next game won’t need people testing to know that it at least works.
If you think this is “a game that I could make money from”, then polish like a madman! Then think about releasing a test version, otherwise you’ll just hear harsh critics.
(I am very pessimistic but I do believe reality is really harsh most of the times)
Why would you have to move around folders? He’ll just release it as a zip/rar file with a jar and a resource folder. And yes, you sure are pessimistic.
Not really. I never release “serious game” before but if I do, I still need people to test it. At least at random chance a rare bug could be found in the progress and you could provide update.
Reality is really harsh.
I think you misunderstood me. I said “won’t need people testing to know that it at least works.”.
Of course you need people to playtest your game, not only to find bugs but also for the balancing and stuff, but the things that have already been sorted out in your previous games, like image loading, sound playing, wouldn’t need to be tested again, that is you won’t have your serious-game thread full of “It does not work on my computer :(”.
It is assumed that you already tested your deployment/image loading methods in your previous “test games” and will not need to worry about them anymore.
that’s it I agree! ;D