Excit for Android – Demo Released!

While Silent Totems is still on summer vacation, I worked hard on bringing the Excit-Experience to the Android. Now that the game is nearly done – only one menu is missing and of course bugfixes – i released the Excit for Android – Demo.

I would like everyone with an Android phone arround to download the demo from android market and give it a try.

For those of you who do not know Excit, you can read Krystians Post-Mortem – or try out the 30 levels Flash version online.

“Only 23.1 percent to go! Excit definitely needed statistics, right?”

Mini Post-Mortem (so far) … What went right:

• Controls: I’m quite happy that the touch controls became great. Of course you can play it with an hardware keyboard, but even I like it more with the touch controls. I had fears that this would not be as good, as the Excit version for Handelsblatt had mouse-only controls, which where sadly quite slow – so that even Krystian and me couldn’t beat our own Highscores. But i found out that the game is perfect for swipe controls on touchscreen.

• 90 Levels are even more addictive: I always like the addictiveness of minimalistic games, where game-play is short, but tense. In the past i was fond of Excit, because i believe we where able to serve something well-cooked in regard to being addictive. But the funny thing is, that i feared having all 90 Levels of our past versions in one game, would make it over the top boring to most people. But no, as far as my early play-testing with others goes, it makes it even more addictive.

• Balancing: The well done addictiveness could also come from the fact, that i managed to re-order all levels and use a concept I planned when doing Princess Nuriko: As a game designer you can never order linear Levels perfectly, so instead I simply created a world-map that allows for parallel paths. So when a player gets stuck somewhere, there is always something else.

• Medals: Excit from the start had the simple yet great idea to allow each level to be completed without collecting bonuses, but will honor players who collect up to 3 bonus pickups. In the past Krystians Highscore calculation took this into account, and with Excit for Android i changed this a little bit. Now with my world-map view, I am displaying medals for each level, showing if a player solved the level, if he collected/found one, two or even three of the pickups, and also special medals if the player solved the Excit level as good or even better than our given solution.

What went wrong:

• Menu layout: Could be better when i had a tool for it. Having our own renderer is very nice, but not having a proper menu framework especially without any tool that can render WYSIWYG previews on PC is extremely slowing down work. It sped up a little when i implemented the ability to update game-content in realtime via network from PC, but still doing menues takes more time than implementing gameplay.

• Polishing: Trying to have it look in the same way Krystian designed it for the flash version is really hard, when you have to manually code everything instead of quickly editing it in flash. As a result it just doesn’t look as perfect as the Flash version – additionally due to the fact that I can’t implement Anti-aliasing on Android via Java – which nevertheless would be way to slow for most phones to day.

So please: Everyone with an Android phone around: download the demo from android market and give it a try. I’m especially interested into everything that seems slow or buggy. Just reply here in the comments or send me an email via Ludocrazy.com!

Two bugs i know of currently (and wasn’t yet able to fix), and would like further feedback:

• -It seems to crash on very low-memory smartphones. Typically those which have small screen resolutions + no hardware 3d gfx + not much ram. If you have such one, please test it and tell me what phone you did use – if it works, or not!
• -One user using the super-duper HTC Sensation reported touch issues (wasn’t barely able to touch a level icon on the world map properly). Would be great if someone could reproduce that!