Trials and Tribulations

Trials:

The game is now officially finished! We tested the game with a few people who were unfamiliar with our game design and took some of their suggestions to fix the game. Such suggestions included giving a more detailed description of the locations of the side games as not to make it too difficult. Also, instructions were needed for gameplay in various areas (such as how to play the Snake Game) in order to address game players who may be inexperienced or uncomfortable with the set-up. Not every suggestion was incorporated into the game because some of them were difficult to code or could not be coded such as:

  1. The x and y-coordinates are displayed above the car and if we try to disable it, more glitches occur with the movement of the car. We have yet to figure out how to remove it.

  2. When you start a side game, you cannot quit the game without restarting the game. The ESCAPE key is the only way to end the game besides getting the target number of answers correct, but it still restrats the game.

  3. In the Speed side game, you must zero in on the car, but to do so you must manipulate the cursor to the desired car. The cursor always starts from the same position (the center of the screen only) and not where the desired car is.

  4. There are minimal boundaries set up on the map so the car tends to drive over trees and rivers. However, we have found that it is still better to give the gamer a wider birth and not restrict movement on the map.

 

Tribulations:

The next step was to get the game online. This caused a lot of problems as the file size was rather large (around 70 MB). We tried to secure a URL (Rapid Share) where we could upload the game but we had some problems such as speed of the download. It would take about 20-30 minutes to download the file if you did not pay for the service. So we tried to look for other websites (000webhost.com) where you could get a free website but the file size had to be less than 5 MB so we couldn't use it. There are many webhosts that you can pay for but none of them were free.

We had been told of the WebDisk with the ucalgary.ca site being able to hold around 50 MB. So we shaved the file size down to 44.8 MB by reducing the picture size and reducing the quality of the music files without greatly changing the game. In fact, it was difficult to see any difference in quality so we were pretty happy.

Then I had the issue of trying to get the game onto the WebDisk only to find that there were several issues with my email address that I had no control over. After some time with the IT department, they were able to set everything up for me and voila! Now the game is up and I have URL for it!