Sunday, July 27, 2008

Dangerous Apples needs your help!

One of the many things on my checklist for completing Dangerous Apples is to refine the list of green cards and red cards. This is the kind of task that really benefits from audience input, so I'd like your help in deciding what the new list of cards should be! I am opening up the floor for suggestions, both for potential nouns and potential adjectives. If there's a noun or adjective that you'd love to see in Dangerous Apples, bring it out there! I will consider anything and everything. Keep in mind that the game is primarily aimed at the Web 2.0 crowd, and that since I'm just stuffing things in the database, I'd like to err on the side of having too many cards rather than too few. If you'd like to see the list of cards that are currently in the database and my initial thoughts on them, you can check out the green cards and the red cards (both in XLS format).

Thanks in advance!

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Bug fix report

So the issues that cropped up in the most recent test have basically all been resolved at this point. I finally figured out why the scores and judge order were getting out of whack - basically when two or more cards were submitted simultaneously (or within the two-second window that I use), it would cause the judge order to jump ahead that many times. Also amusing was why it didn't work in IE. Apparently, disabling the submit button, which I do to avoid repeat submits, actually disables form submission altogether.

Now - who wants to do more testing? :)

Friday, July 18, 2008

Another user test!

I just got back from a test with real, actual, live users, and overall, things went pretty well. I introduced a completely new set of people to the game, including my first remote user. Overall, people liked it a lot, but as usual, there were some issues that cropped up, which isn't surprising considering that I totally gutted the application's code since the last time I tested:

-First, it appears that I have lost the game of Web Browser Bingo that any web app must play. The "join game" screen was completely non-functional in IE 7, and one user was forced to download Firefox. As much as people should be using Firefox anyway, it's not really Dangerous Apples' place to force that decision on them.
-Some players did not receive a hand of cards when the game page first loaded, but received them upon a page refresh. I'm setting the "game has started" flag before the cards are dealt, so it's probably related to that.
-Occasionally, the function to reward the winner with an extra point and move onto the next judge was called multiple times, resulting in inaccurate scores and worse, an inconsistent judge status. This was also fixed by a refresh, but I'm not sure why it's happening.
-Some red cards came up multiple times in a game. This might be a race condition issue.
-It was a bit confusing to tell who had won the previous round. To fix this, I will restore the "Last round's winner" display, as well as highlight the winning card, both of which were missing.
-The game should be less formalized - people should be allowed to join and leave during the middle of a game (which might be an issue to decide where in the judge order they should go). Additionally, given that we got to round 34 out of 20, you should be allowed to play as many rounds as you want.
-Other than that, the main issues were just in terms of layout and making sure people know where everything is. And grammar fixes.

So I'd like to say thanks to all my testers (both in this session and in past sessions), and if I missed anything else, feel free to post it!