Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Game development with Board Game Arena Studio
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fa81
Posts: 32
Joined: 25 November 2016, 16:35

Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by fa81 »

Hi!

As some of you may have seen in the Studio Projects already, I have been implementing P.I. (Treefrog Games) over the last couple weeks. It's "feature complete" now and definitely playable.

There are some UI quirks still, that I am aware of. And probably real bugs – but I've played some full games now, without encountering any. So please help me to find them ;)

Also, this is my first implementation at all, so maybe I've done some things totally wrong. Still completely missing: stats, proper values for slow|fast|medium_additional_time; if someone has hints for how to set those pre-release? Or ideas for stats?

http://studio.boardgamearena.com/#!gamepanel?game=pi
Rules: http://www.treefroggames.com/wp-content ... es_eng.pdf

I'll open one or two games; feel free to invite me, if you want to play. My developer account: fneumann0

Thanks in advance!
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Victoria_La
Posts: 607
Joined: 28 December 2015, 20:55

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by Victoria_La »

Did you go through pre-release checklist?
http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Pre-release_checklist

Spectator mode does not work


Notice: Undefined offset: 2300670 in /var/tournoi/release/tournoi-180209-1610-gs/www/game/module/table/table.game.php on line 1048

Notice: Undefined index: in /var/tournoi/release/games/pi/999999-9999/pi.view.php on line 55

Notice: Undefined index: in /var/tournoi/release/games/pi/999999-9999/pi.view.php on line 56

Project checker has this warning:

pi.game.php:247: Warning: Possibly untranslated "Tile is not on the board. Please report this.": throw new BgaVisibleSystemException("Tile is not on the board. Please report this.");...
User avatar
fa81
Posts: 32
Joined: 25 November 2016, 16:35

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by fa81 »

Victoria_La wrote:Did you go through pre-release checklist?
http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Pre-release_checklist
Good point. Will do that this weekend.
Spectator mode does not work
Notice: Undefined offset: 2300670 in /var/tournoi/release/tournoi-180209-1610-gs/www/game/module/table/table.game.php on line 1048
Notice: Undefined index: in /var/tournoi/release/games/pi/999999-9999/pi.view.php on line 55
Notice: Undefined index: in /var/tournoi/release/games/pi/999999-9999/pi.view.php on line 56
table.game.php is not part of my code, right? Not sure what this could be about.

Spectator mode is interesting. Did not think about this. The lines in pi.view.php that yield the Notices are where I do something like this:

Code: Select all

global $g_user;
$current_player_id = $g_user->get_id();
$left_neighbor = $this->game->getPlayerAfter($current_player_id)
$this->game->loadPlayersBasicInfos()[$left_neighbor]
I guess in spectator mode there is no current user, and $left_neighbor is null in the end. Are spectators supposed to see private information? Probably not, right? So I'd check for null here (or is there an explicit spectator mode check?) and simply hide the card hand.
Project checker has this warning:
pi.game.php:247: Warning: Possibly untranslated "Tile is not on the board. Please report this.": throw new BgaVisibleSystemException("Tile is not on the board. Please report this.");...
This one I intentionally did not mark for translation, because of this guideline in the translation docs:
http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Translations wrote:This does NOT include error messages that are not supposed to happened (unexpected errors).
User avatar
fa81
Posts: 32
Joined: 25 November 2016, 16:35

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by fa81 »

Spectator mode fixed.
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Victoria_La
Posts: 607
Joined: 28 December 2015, 20:55

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by Victoria_La »

The other comment you need a lot more tooltips. The font on the board is unreadable, and when I hover
oven on boards elements or collected "cards" and stuff it does not show what it is, only top row of cards have proper tooltips.
User avatar
fa81
Posts: 32
Joined: 25 November 2016, 16:35

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by fa81 »

Yeah, the game's board has always been pretty.... messy. I even wondered if I should add a "mute colors" switch, that reduces the saturation of the board a bit, so the tokens stand out more. Would be a nice feature. But for now keep it close to the original. I added tooltips to all cards and tiles. I mean, most people who know the game, know what cards and tiles are there (it's a 1:1 relation after all), but it sure helps to have tooltips. I also added a tooltip when selecting a location to send an investigator.
User avatar
fa81
Posts: 32
Joined: 25 November 2016, 16:35

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by fa81 »

I experimented with card/tile name overlays. Makes text (much) more readable, but of course looks also a little strange. Other advantage: card names could be translated. Not sure how important that is for this game.

Before:
Image

After:
Image

Even better:

Image

Opinions?
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Victoria_La
Posts: 607
Joined: 28 December 2015, 20:55

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by Victoria_La »

fa81 wrote:I experimented with card/tile name overlays. Makes text (much) more readable, but of course looks also a little strange. Other advantage: card names could be translated. Not sure how important that is for this game.


Opinions?
I loaded it myself, and I am not big fan, its definitely cleaner but since its not everywhere it looks like font mesh.
I would just leave as tooltip - its translatable. I would remove the question mark from tooltips though and maybe set the orange background
to make it theme-like (to remove question mark just use html variant of API not the text/action one)
User avatar
fa81
Posts: 32
Joined: 25 November 2016, 16:35

Re: Call for testers: P.I. is ready!

Post by fa81 »

In the last days I improved the UI (squished here and there to make the game less space consuming); fixed a remaining token placement bug; added card name overlays (I'm pretty happy with them) and nicer tooltips; played a couple more test rounds (and got very valuable feedback and UX improvement suggestions, i.e. the card-tile-relation highlighting); implemented zombie mode.

Only remaining task right now: Stats.

If you wanna give it another try…
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