WTF Cro-Mag Rally on Windows Phone 7?

"Um, WTF?"

That about sums up the launch of Cro-Mag Rally for Windows Phone 7.  Let's talk about what happened and even more important-- what we're doing to fix it.  But first, an apology.

To everyone out there who tried Cro-Mag for WP7 and found the controls to be, shall we say, lacking: we're sorry.  We screwed up.  During the process of porting Cro-Mag from iOS, we got some great feedback from our (MGS) publishing team that the controls were, as I believe one tester said, "stupidly hard".  We put a bunch of effort into addressing that feedback, and the result was the controls system that we launched with.  We thought that was good enough, but the overwhelming customer feedback told us we were wrong.

With some help from Microsoft Game Studios, who have been really supportive of Cro-Mag throughout development, we went back to the drawing board to figure out what was wrong.  One conclusion we came away with is, well, WP7 gamers are not the same as iPhone gamers.  You have, shall we say, "different" standards?  In general, you want tighter controls and a greater range of customization in your settings.

Armed with that knowledge, the forum feedback, and with the help of some dedicated testers, we did a bunch of test versions of different controls.  We settled on the version that got the most "thumbs up" from our test team.  The final result is embodied in the Title Update that is working its way through certification right now.  Here's what you'll find in 1.1.0:

• Lower camera for better overall car control
• Implement auto-accelerate.  You no longer need to hold down F to keep going.
• Tweak physics for cars on medium difficulty to make them a little less grippy (easier to drift through turns)
• Tweak control response curve to make it more "linear" (and thus more responsive at smaller angles off-center)
• Tweak dynamic range of the sensitivity setting.  The least sensitive setting should require nearly 90 degree rotation of phone to achieve maximum turn.  Most sensitive setting requires only about 30 degrees to achieve maximum turn.  
• Lower maximum speed for all cars in certain tracks (the more curvy ones) in order to slow down the overall pace (and make them a little easier).  Does not apply to Expert mode.
• Tweak the wall collision code to prevent certain instances of being able to go off map

We also investigated some bigger changes, like adding a non-accelerometer-based control option, and doing away with the Forward/Reverse control altogether, but those changes would have taken more time, and our #1 priority was to address the immediate problems ASAP.

To those who already tried Cro-Mag, we hope you'll take another look once the update goes live and let us know what you think of the changes.  If you like them, please feel free to express your opinion in the review area of the Marketplace.  If you still don't like them, let us know what you'd change.  You can reach us at cromag@citizen12.com.

The Art of being Done. Almost.

One of the funny things about game development is the art of being “done.”  We finished the port of Cro-Mag Rally from iOS to Windows Phone 7 at the end of December, where we hunkered down in our San Diego office amid torrential downpours.  So you would think it’s all margaritas and frosty bugs while we wait for the royalties to roll in.

Not so.

While we had managed to complete all features, there were still a number of bugs to be retired.  Bugs included things like:

• Skeletons and animations didn’t work right for all models
• Effects and particles didn’t look… quite right
• performance, though much improved, was still not as good as we wanted
• weapons often fired in the wrong directions

 
Poor Brog and Grag.

Who would have thought it was so hard to make a nice fire?

So, after porting thousands of lines of code, four bugs should be nothing to worry about.  Ha.  These four bugs alone represented about 40 dev-hours of effort.

But now that we’ve got those bugs retired, we should be done, right?

Almost.

It’s true that we have resolved all known issues at this point, but when you’re publishing to a platform like Xbox LIVE Arcade or Windows Phone 7, you have to meet certain technical certification requirements (aka “TCRs”).  So onto the task list go things like:

• Handle “tombstoning” (when the user puts your app to sleep then returns to it)
• Manage resource loading to avoid long waits without screen refresh
• Create trial version
• Review Windows Marketplace “Best Practices”

So with all this work to do how come we said we were “done” back in December?

I have had some pretty heated conversations about the nature of “done” in software development, and in particular game development.  A lot of people think, with good reason, that devs tend to be rather… optimistic in their notion of what constitutes being “done” with a feature.  People who run large projects are held accountable for getting these projects out the door and into customers’ hands, so when they hear a dev say they’ll be “done” by some date, they automatically tack on another 20% or more to estimate when the thing will transition from “done” to “ready to send to customers.”

Entire methodologies are centered around getting the subjectivity out of the definition of “done.”  There’s some good in these practices in that they help people be more introspective about how they spend their time and effort, but I don’t believe “done” is a four-letter word to be vilified and analyzed until its meaning can be explained with a flow chart.

I think, maybe, that “being done” is something we need on a more human level.  We need “done” to be kind of squishy and subjective because we need something to strive toward while we’re in our basements or garages or cubicles putting our blood and sweat into making games.  We humans (and even we devs) need “done” to be a friend.  Someone we can look forward to coming over and having a beer.  We need it to be a little flexible because we undertake these efforts to build features and fix bugs knowing that we don’t know for sure how long it’s going to take or how many nights we’ll have to sit in bed or on the couch with our laptops working on a problem long after the rest of our families have gone to sleep.  We need that sense of being done in order to recharge and prepare to do it again, as we know we will.

So if I’ve just checked in a fix for a bug that was supposed to take a couple of hours and instead took me 3 days and 42 cups of coffee to resolve, perhaps I can be forgiven for calling the feature “done” even if it’s not accompanied by a full complement of unit tests and documentation.  If you’re a manager who has chewed someone out for calling something done when it didn’t meet your 15-point Checklist for Completeness™, then shame on you.

So—tldr—is Cro Mag for Windows Phone 7 done or not??

Because we’re a "Managed Indie” title we’ll need to add Achievements once we get the necessary tools from Microsoft.  And we need to localize the game to 5 languages.

But then!  Then we are truly, truly done.

Until it’s time for a Title Update.

Windows Phone 7 app sales

While we don't have any apps up on the WP7 App Store yet, we've started getting reports from our friends who do have apps.

It's not pretty.

One report of 20 copies sold, TOTAL, since launch.  Another report of about 4 copies per day.  There's also this post from TNW reporting less that stellar results.

Everyone is saying it's still too early to make a call on the success of the platform.  My sense is that this battle is similar to the one Microsoft waged with Sony in the console space, back when everyone said the world didn't need a Playstation competitor, and even if it did, Microsoft was not the right contender.  Fast forward several years and we see Xbox 360 and LIVE as solid contributors to the company's bottom line.

It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft's next move is for WP7.