Alley Avenger is Live! Soft release available on the Google Play Store!

Finally! After much anticipation, Alley Avenger v1.2 is finally playable from the Google Play Store, and I’m excited! As a marketing strategy, I haven’t gone public with this yet, but it’s hard not to tell friends and family. Although it is now on the market, I’m considering this as a soft launch. The following features are available for the current release:

• 20 Playable Levels
• 2 Bosses (skull and tank)
• 5 Power-up/Abilities that can be purchased from the store
• Options to mute sound and music, as well as change the color of the current character
• Level Achievements – Finish a level without getting damage or destroy all objects
• Google Play Achievements – Unlock achievements from various accomplishments in game

Soon to come:

• Leaderboards (Google Play) – Compare number of Level Achievements with friends
• More Levels and Bosses
• More Abilities and Powerups
• Different Guns that have varying strengths and weaknesses
• Better graphics

Really looking forward to seeing how far this will go! Stay tuned!

Children – Natures Game Testers

The other day I was visiting my girlfriend’s cousins, two boys who are 3 and 5. These two kids love their iPads and play plenty of mobile games on them. It shocks me how well they do in these games too. Using touch as an interface for games has increased usability so much now, that younger generations are able to play video games more easily. It amazed me that the 5 year old, Luke, was struggling to use the mouse with my computer, yet the 3 year old (Chase) could navigate an iPhone with ease.

They were enthralled for a good 10 minutes. A new record!

Seeing Luke and Chase play demonstrates that children are people in their simplest form. Sounds stupid, right? Maybe it is…but what I’m trying to say is that, typically speaking, a 3 and 5 year old can’t read, figure out “intent”, or have preconceived notions when playing a game. They just…play. This leads me to believe that they are valuable to have as testers.

That said, every mess-up they do in the game has me second guess the functionality. Thanks to them, I’ve reworked the tutorial and added “swipe up to jump” to the game. Don’t underestimate using children as testers. They enjoy it, and I pay them back by owning them at wresting.

Quest For A New Name

Finding a good name for your game can be stressful. No matter how optimistic you want to be, users will always judge a book by a cover. A bad name can deter users from a potential download, period. Recently I stumbled across 10 Tips to Making a Great Game Name. This article outlined a few pitfalls I had in my current working title: Hack ‘n Slash.

• Too Generic – Violates rule #10. Despite sounding catchy, “Hack and Slash” is also a genre type.
• Not As Pertinent Anymore – Violates rule #8. Since I changed the gameplay to consist mostly on the gun aspect, hacking and slashing become (still useful) but minor part of the game.

After racking my brain for a day and polling a few of my friends, I finally came up with a name that seems to stick: Alley Avenger. Isn’t the alliteration fun? Also, a neat little side effect, since it starts with an ‘A’, it will be among the first apps the user sees when they go to the app drawer on their phone (since apps are sorted alphabetically).