It’s time for the most important post we’ll publish around this year’s Critters. The awards? A mere sideshow. The incredible entertainment? An afterthought. Now we know (and based on Twitter we really do know) that you’ve all been most perplexed by what to wear. Well, help is at hand, we’ve put together a guide to ‘what to wear for The Critters’  which means you’ll avoid any fashion faux pas on the night.

Dress Code – Black Tie

For those of you who are committing 100% to the theme, we applaud you. All of the Ubelly team will be rocking the full on Black Tie look and we’ve been drawing inspiration from this handy guide. That means dress shirt, tuxedo, bow tie and (polished) black shoes. A handkerchief tucked into your jacket pocket is optional, but highly recommended.

Also acceptable: Hollywood Black Tie or to 99.9% of the population – a suit and black tie.

The playing it cool alternative to full on black-tie, just pair your favourite shirt with a black tie and a matching jacket and trousers and you’ll be flying.

And if you need any more persuading as to why you should suit up:

We know for some of you suiting up is a deal breaker, so we’re willing to compromise. Penguins look an awful lot like they’re wearing a suit already, so if you come wearing a Penguin Onesie and some form of bow tie we’ll accept that as embracing the spirit of the dress code.

And for the ladies – We’re confident you don’t need our help to look amazing, but if you need  a starting point, we’d recommend your favourite cocktail dress and your best dancing shoes.

Of course if you want to don Onesies as well, we won’t hold it against you.

As for what not to wear. Well, if you could make sure your clothes are clean and you’re not wearing Pyjamas that would be a start. Basically if you’d wear it while lounging around your bedroom hungover on a weekend, it’s probably not going to be suitable for wearing to The Critters (Penguin Onesies excepted)

Still not got your ticket? Don’t miss out, grab one today!

For the majority of us, cheesy kung fu movies are something we grew up with and if we’re honest still hold a secret passion for. That’s why we were so excited to interview the studio behind Buddha Finger, which has really captured that 1980′s feeling while also providing fast, exciting game play. We chatted with Anna Marsh, the Design Director at Lady Shotgun studios to find out a little more about the project.

What, in your opinion, is unique about Lady Shotgun as an indie game studio?

I started Lady Shotgun initially because I’d become a mother, and I wanted to work flexible hours and cut the commute out.  My friends Sarah – who I’d worked with at Eidos – and Gaby – who I knew as our children went to the same creche – were both in similar situations.  That was the catalyst, the three of us wanted to create something together around our childcare requirements.  So that’s pretty unique, a studio started by three mums   For Buddha Finger we all worked from our own homes and although the company has outgrown my home now and needs to move to an office space, I’m really keen to allow our team members who prefer to work from home do so.  Commuting can be such a massive waste of time and energy in my opinion and when people can work their favoured hours rather than being forced into office hours I find they’re far more productive. So that aspect means that we can employ a far more diverse range of developers than many studios, indie or otherwise.

What is the inspiration behind Buddha Finger?

I wanted to design a game that really used the touchscreen interface in an immediate way, I like designing what the game is going to feel like first so I was searching for something that would feel great with a touchscreen.  I was watching Kung Fu Panda with my daughter and the part where the old wise tortoise Oogway beats the powerful tiger Tai Lung, I realised that the touchscreen would be the perfect way to capture the feel of that mystical kung fu pressure point attack. The mechanics were inspired by Elite Beat Agents – press the points in numerical order – but instead of it being based on rhythm, it’s based on how fast you go. That introduces an element of risk/reward, the faster you go, the higher your score, but the more likely it is you will make a mistake.

How did you settle on the final design and style of the game?

I adore kung fu films and those cheesy 1980s action movies with Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Segal,  and that seemed to suit the idea of the mystical kung fu style well, so we based our aesthetic and narrative on this idea.  I had a lot of fun looking through reference stuff with Gabriela Pavan, the lead artist, and picking out actors and poses to base the characters on, and coming up with ideas for locations and story with writer Katharine Neil (whos a great indie developer in her own right!) inspired by these films.  Katharine did a lot of watching these kinds of movies for research too! She called it a Van Dammathon

What’s your process for designing the user experience / journey?

I have quite a particular way of working actually – if I can’t fully visualise the fundamental, “second to second” gameplay I find it impossible to do anything.  So I spend some time holed up on my own working that out on paper, then when I understand it, I can start talking to the rest of the team and feedback.  For Buddha Finger after I’d worked out the gameplay, I made a flow chart with all the skills we need to introduce to the player, and roughly the number of levels we were aiming for, then I sit down with the story writer, Katharine, and we started to spin out ideas for. Gaby had already designed many of the bosses, so looking at them and coming up with who they were and the locations they could appear in gave us the skeleton of the story, and we fleshed dout using our “kung fu/cheesy 1980′s action film” reference. And finally, I then tried to ramp up the difficulty throughout the game, and use some special levels with different “enemies” – like, a woman in labour, you help her give birth with the power of you kung fu technique! – to mix things up a bit.

What do you think the biggest challenges are in designing for touch screens compared to traditional inputs?

I much prefer designing for touch screens now actually! I think they’re more immediate and intimate than traditional controllers, the player is directly in touch with the game. The big change is I think that with a controller, most of your actions are relative to a player character – jump, punch, shoot, whatever.  With a touchscreen, the actions become more relative to the whole screen – so, if I want my character to move forwards I tap somewhere in the environment  for them to move to, rather than push the character forwards.

With Buddha Finger I designed something that just wouldn’t work with a traditional controller because I wanted to use that interface in an immediate way, it translates a real world action of pressing points with your fingers to pressing those points on a screen, its quite a direct translation of the real world to the game world which is why I think it works.  I wanted to make players feel like “finger ninjas”, so I spent a lot of time setting up the positions of the points and the time pacing between them, so that the player’s hand movements would become something reminisent of classic kung fu film choerography.

What is unique about the Windows/Windows Phone versions of the game?

So far we’ve released only on iOS before, which we did simply because we had the most experience on this platform. For Windows we have altered some of the text and images to the age rating below 12+ , we’re on track to add an “easy mode” very soon to make it easy enough to play for younger players.  We’ve also added some improvements to the UI – the direction of the spiral points is much clearer for example.  And, we’ve included a trial mode – which is made very easy on Windows because there’s no necessity to add IAP to do it.  That i’m very pleased by – letting players try before they buy is really key to showing the game off.  For Windows 8 we’ve also included mouse and keyboard controls and a landscape screen mode.

What is the most important lesson you learned while developing Buddha Finger?

Patience   You have to take it as it comes as an indendent developer – you simply don’t have the resources to brute force things through if they’re not happening naturally.  Coming from console development, it can be difficult at first but you soon learn to keep a variety of stuff to do on the task list so if, for example, your audio person has to take a paying freelance job to pay their rent or whatever in the middle of implementing sound, you switch to doing some PR stuff for a while. that way you keep things rolling around obstacles.

With each of the founding managers working in different countries, how does that affect your development process and what tools do you use to collaborate?

The whole team for Buddha Finger worked from their own homes, and we were pretty scattered! The only way we can do this is by being very organised, I did a load of preproduction right at the start of development that allowed us to break the game up into chunks and assign to the different team members.  We used Team Lab and Assembla to co-ordinate tasks, and I’ve used Jira with Lemon Moose who have helped out with the ports.  Keeping everything in one place using one of these tools this helps a lot, it can be very difficult to find informaiton in emails after just a few weeks working on a project.

How do you build your games to work across a range of platforms?

Well we originally started off as iOS native, using Coco’s 2D, simply because it was the platform the team had the most experience in and this was the fastest.  In future we’re looking to use a cross platform engine from the get go though.  We have partially used Marmalade for the ports but almost all the Windows version is Lemon Moose’s own game engine.

One decision that really worked was to make the game as data driven as possible. That basically means that the code provides the framework to the game, but almost all the content – which enemies are in what levels, how the levels and cutscenes link together, where the points appear on each enemy and the scores the player will ge from pressing them – is kept in XML data files.  It keeps the code as mimimal and clean as possible and lets the coders concentrate on code, whilst I concentrate on making the game fun to play.  Its meant that Lemon Moose have been able to put together the ports reletively swiftly.

What advice would you give anyone working across platforms to make sure they stay true to the ethos of the OS, brand guidelines etc?

Using a cross platform engine helps a lot with technical issues. There are downsides, of course, but for our next projects we’ll do cross platform from the get go.  Doing submissions accross mulitple app stores can take up a lot of time so make sure you have a team memeber who’s prepared and has the time devoted to do the submissions.  There can be a big difference in how age ratings are treated between platforms for example, and screenshots must be correct proportions for each platform.

There are some noticable “brand” differences between the platforms in terms of content – a quick evaluation, I would say:  Apple seem to be focus on games with high production values – a strong, beautiful aesthetic is important. Windows is very family orientated and like games parents and children can play together, and particularly Windows 8 is very hot on age ratings.  BlackBerry are keen on social aspects like leaderboards being implemented. Android I admit looks like a bit of a free for all right now!

I suppose the key thing is to make a great game that looks good and then you’ll improve your chances on all platforms.  After that, you need to either focus on one platform at a time for your submissions, or make sure you do a lot of prep work on all platforms to make sure you’re ready to submit on all of the simultaneously.

What drew you to the Windows 8 and Windows Phone platforms for the game title?

I was showing Buddha Finger with Katharine at the Eurogamer Expo and a former colleague of mine who now works for Microsoft passed by and played the iOS version. He loved it, and passed our details to the Phone team and when I got in touch with the team they were so very enthusiastic and supportive that it swayed my decision to make the first port to Windows.

What has been the experience in developing for the platforms?

Excellent! Granted, we’ve had a few hiccups in the submission process which seems just due to the newness of the platforms, but there’s excellent access to support from Microsoft.  As well as the awesome tech evangelist we’ve been working with the online support is great, you can get tech support via instant chat system which is very helpful.

What’s next for Lady Shotgun?

We’ve got few projects potentially in the pipeline, we’ve got as far as a couple of basic prototypes and some very sweet concept art!  One is a FPS with intuitive touch screen controls, and the other something for older tablet owners. I’m very excitied by the possibilities but to be honest I wont’t get time to really concentrate on anything properly until I’ve done a few more weeks of PR-y stuff for the Windows Buddha Finger.  One of the things about being indie which is simultaneously great and hard is that I do so many different jobs, I’m designer, project manager, PR, QA, production and art intern, business development…. I’m the only full time member of Lady Shotgun so it can get crazy! But, it can also take me in really fun and interesting directions so for the time being at least, I’m enjoying going with the flow!

Ready to build your game? That’s great, register today for a Windows Store account, download the Windows 8 SDK and you’ll be flying.

Or do you want to get something built in just 10 minutes?  Then  make sure you check out ZipApp.

Not all those who wander are lost

The Critters is a mere two months away and we’ve been beavering away over the last couple of weeks to make sure it’s worth the wait. We want to give you enough time to prepare your outfits, so we thought it was only fair to give you a sneak preview of what you can expect on the night.

Things never happen the same way twice

We want this to be more than just an awards ceremony, we want it to be an immersive, narrative led experience. That’s why we’ve chosen a theme with a difference, we’re going to be transporting you back to your childhood and recreating some favourite fairy tale settings. Explore three very different worlds as we take you on a journey through The Looking Glass, into Middle-Earth and around Narnia.

But that’s not all. As usual, we’ll give you the responsibility of selecting the winners on the night. Who wins? You decide. Our team of expert judges have been locked away with the impossible job of trying to narrow down all the amazing entries we received to a final shortlist of three for each category. We’ll be announcing this final list early in May, so make sure you keep an eye out for the announcements so you can decide your winners in advance.

Curioser and curioser

We’re delighted that some very special guests will be joining us on our journey. The awesome Ray Guns Look Real Enough, the UK’s finest stand-up/comedy/mash-up geniuses are coming along for the ride and will be performing live on the night.

We’ve got lots more still to reveal so stay tuned. We promise you won’t want to miss this party, so if you haven’t already register your interest now.

Are you in the planning stages for your game? Or are you looking for the tools which will help you turn your idea into a reality?  There’s a range of engines out there for you to choose from, ranging from the forthcoming Unity to Microsoft’s own Visual Studio.

Construct2

Have a great idea for a game, but lack the coding skills to produce your vision? Well help is at hand with Construct2, which builds great 2D games in HTML5 with no prior coding experience required. Construct2 is also perfect for seasoned devs looking to build a prototype of a larger project and its bespoke Javascript SDK allows these users to hack the engine to meet their own ends.  A fantastic example of what’s possible with Construct2 is provided by Henry Hoffman and Mortar Melon. When we caught up with Henry to discuss the game we were amazed it had taken them just 1 day to put the initial prototype together.

Visual Studio

One of the powerhouses of games development, Visual Studio packs in a modifiable code engine which supports a whole range of languages and one of the most advanced debuggers available. It has everything you need to build and manage your project from start to finish.  One of our favourite games of the last year, Janksy, was developed using Visual Studio in an incredible 10 weeks showcasing what it can offer to indie studios.

“Visual Studio is the best IDE available today for developing games”. Richard McKinney, CTO, Halfbrick

Unity

Unity provides the tools to build 3D games on a grand scale – think epic third-person role playing adventures or intense first-person shooters. With support for DirectX 11, a unique animation system and tools to help your game run on mobile, Unity is the perfect platform for the ambitious developers out there. It’s currently in public beta and we can’t wait to see what you all produce with it.

Marmalade

Marmalade offers you the flexibility to build awesome games for mobile platforms using languages you’re already familiar with. With a choice of base language between  C++, HTML5 or Lua, Marmalade offers further options by including support for a range of other open-source libraries.   The potential of Marmalade is incredible – last year’s smash hit Draw Something was built using it and there are a range of other exciting games in the pipeline.

Ready to build your game? That’s great, register today for a Windows Store account, download the Windows 8 SDK and you’ll be flying.

Or do you want to get something built in just 10 minutes?  Then  make sure you check out ZipApp.

The indie gaming craze continues to go from strength to strength, with indie developers embracing mobile and touch focused platforms and producing incredible games with a speed and agility that larger developers simply can’t match.

It’s not just existing developers who are attracted by the possibilities offered by mobile. We’re increasingly seeing new players and home enthusiasts get their big break through app stores. The Canadian studio Pandemica is a great example of this, with 2 friends quitting their day jobs to set up a mobile games studio a little over three years ago and today they employ 35 people and have released 15 titles, over half of which have been downloaded more than 1 million times.

The UK too is embracing mobile. Chimpact is a real trendsetter here and is blazing a path across every platform and looks set to become the next Angry Birds, with rave reviews flooding in thick and fast. We’ve always dreamed of swinging through the jungle like Tarzan and although this may never happen, Chimpact’s addictive game play is going a long way to sating our dreams.

In a sure sign of a game entering the public consciousness, it’s also beginning to attract celebrity fans, with the below tweet from Jonathan Ross our current favourite endorsement.

So I did get some writing done, but also played Chimpact on my Windows touch laptop, which is cool. Addicted to making the chimp dance. Fun!

— jonathan ross (@wossy) March 18, 2013

Meanwhile Mortar Melon, an old favourite of the Ubelly team, has soared past 250,000 downloads. When we caught up with Henry Hoffman, one of the geniuses behind it back in December he was quietly confident the game would be a success, but we’re sure he’s been blown away by the impact it’s had in so short a time.

Not content with developing awesome games, our industry has also found the time to debate the pros and cons of funding a game via Kickstarter. We couldn’t agree more with  Thomas Bidaux, the CEO of  ICO Partners who stressed the need to have a solid concept behind the game. Being on Kickstarter is no longer a unique selling point and with an ever growing number of devs competing for funding it’s vital to identify what will make your game stand out and use this as your selling point, not the way you hope to fund development.

Looking for help and support with your Windows 8 game? Our  LinkedIn group will  help you connect with like minded developers.  Or if your game’s nearing completion, our essential guide to testing will make sure it flies through the Windows Store

Key Resources:

• Build a Windows 8 app in 10 minutes with ZipApp
• Collect points for publishing Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps to get rewards like TV’s, Windows 8 tablets and travel vouchers. You’ll get 10 bonus points for just signing up to the Rewards Programme between the 1^st and 14^th April 2013. Register today and start building.
• Sign up for a free Windows Store App Lab to get 1:1 design and UX guidance
• Head over to dev.windows.com and design.windows.com for all the resources you need to start building Windows 8 apps

Here at Ubelly we want to help you make the most of the possibilities Windows 8 offers game developers. And we want to make sure that when the time comes to let your baby out into the world, you’ve covered every base, so the user gets the exact experience and thrill you intended them to.

That’s why we’re delighted to present this guide from Lee Stott on what Microsoft’s crack verification team looks for. We hope this will make your testing process as smooth as possible, so that when you submit it to the Windows Store, the verification process will be a mere formality.

In the world of games your Windows 8 Game is the focus of the whole user experience. For this experience to be delightful to gamers, you want to ensure that your game is well tested and represent a high level of quality. Producing a Windows Store game involves four main stages: design, development, testing and finally distribution.

In this post, we cover a few high level verification areas related to testing your game in preparation for submission to the Windows Store.

In this post, we don’t distinguish between the specific types of verification. Instead, we provide a broad set of high-level verification areas and exercises that will help you ensure that your game represents a high level of quality. In addition to these verification areas, you can also verify the functionality of your game during development using Visual Studio for debugging and testing, and the Visual Studio Unit Test Tools.

Windows Store game’s can transition between various runtime states. Based on this game lifecycle, we like to think of these key areas of verification:

• Activated: verify the game through several activation paths
• Running: verify the game at runtime
• Suspended: verify the game suspends correctly
• Resumed: verify the game resumes correctly
• Terminated: verify the game terminates
• Not running: verify behavior when your game is not running

Let’s dive deeper into the key verification areas during each of these areas.

Verify activation behavior of the game

To test activation we need to go through the various contexts in which users can launch your game. It is important to verify each activation scenario your game supports. Here are the common contexts in which users can activate your game:

• Tile: The launch of your game through the tile is very likely the first interaction that users have with your game. Verify that your game follows the appropriate game launch design pattern.
• Toast notifications: If your game supports toast notifications, verify that your game activates functions as expected when you click an incoming notification that your game is meant to handle.
• Search: If your game supports Search, verify that your game activates and that you can complete a search in your game. If your game supports displaying search suggestions, verify that it functions as expected.
• Share target: If your game supports being a Share target, verify that your game activates and posts the content shared from another game for the supported types of content.
• Protocol: If your game registers for a protocol, verify that you can activate your game by launching various types of URLs corresponding to this protocol.
• File association: If your game registers to handle a file type, verify that you can activate your game by launching files of the corresponding file type.
• File pickers/contact picker: If your game is registered as a file open/save picker or as a contact picker, verify that you can activate your game in those contexts.

Verify runtime behavior of the game

Verifying the functionality of a Windows Store game is a combination of verifying the common characteristics that game has to all games, and verifying the game specific functionality. In addition to the key verification scenarios we talk about in a moment, you must also verify the game-specific functionality. This involves understanding the key scenarios targeted by your game and verifying that these scenarios work as expected.

Tiles

The game tile is a core part of your game, and possibly the most frequently seen part of your game. The following aspects of your tile behavior are important to verify:

• If your game supports live tiles, verify its behavior while your game is running. Verify that the tile updates are consistent with the state displayed within your game.
• If your game supports secondary tiles, verify that they display the expected info. You need to also verify that clicking the secondary tile results in the game launching and taking you to the expected context within the game.
• If your game supports notification badges in the tiles, verify that any badge update shows as expected, and that it is consistent with the corresponding state displayed within your game.

Toast notifications

If your game supports toast notifications, verify that the toasts trigger and display correctly. Also verify that clicking the toast notification results in the game launching and taking you to the expected context within the game.

Contracts and extensions

We looked at a few contracts earlier as part of verifying the activation behavior of your game. Let’s look at a few additional areas related to verifying contracts at runtime:

• Share source: If your game supports being a sharing source, verify that you can use the Share charm to share content from your game (for the supported types of content) to other target games on the machine.
• Play to: If your game supports the Play To contract, verify that you can use the Devices charm to play media from your game on a remote device.
• Settings: If your game supports the Settings contract, verify that you can view and modify your game specific settings. Also, verify that the game persists the modified settings across termination/re-launch.

Windows Game Certification Kit

The Windows App Certification Kit allows you to verify that your game meets the Windows Store submission criteria. This kit includes automated tests to verify the usage of supported APIs, testing for crashes/hangs, verification of the application manifest, and launch/suspension time performance. We recommend that you run this kit early and often. We’ve experienced a number of situations where the game didn’t make it to the Store by the deadline because the game owner waited till the last minute to run the certification kit against the game. If you run the kit early and often you can discover and fix any game issues quickly and submit your game to the Store. The Windows App Certification Kit documentation has details on the types of tests the kit does and additional tips on the configurations under which to run the kit.

Snapped and fill views

Users can run your Windows Store game under various view states. In addition to the full screen view, users can use your game in the snapped and fill views. It is important to verify that your game handles these view state transitions correctly.

• Verify that your game supports the snapped and fill views. Verify that your game maintains the context when it gets snapped or unsnapped.
• Verify that snapping and unsnapping doesn’t destroy the user’s work or state.
• Verify that the user can interact with your game while it is snapped.

Rotation

Users can rotate and flip their tablets and monitors. If your game supports the portrait orientation in addition to the landscape orientation, verify that your game can handle the orientation changes. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Windows Store Apps to test your game in both modes. So, you don’t necessarily need a tablet device to test this scenario.

Touch

Windows 8 enables games to have a number of new touch experiences. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Windows Store Apps to test the touch interactions that your game supports. So, you don’t necessarily need dedicated touch hardware to verify these interactions.

• Verify that all the controls used in the game are standard basic controls that are touch-friendly. Depending on your programming language, use either the XAML controls or the JavaScript controls.
• Verify that your Windows Store App follows the standard Touch interaction design.
• Verify that your game provides visual feedback for the user actions.
• Verify that your game avoids dragging actions from the edges of the screen to avoid conflicting with the Windows OS gestures.
• If the game supports any text input controls, verify that the soft keyboard works as expected. Verify that the area with the keyboard focus shifts up into view when the soft keyboard is displayed.

Playing audio

Windows 8 supports a model for Windows Store Apps to play audio, including playing in the background. Here’s what we recommend for testing audio:

• If your game plays audio, verify that it handles the sound level notifications appropriately when a user switches between your game and other types of audio games. For example, you might want to pause the game when it receives a “Muted” notification. For details, see Audio playback in a Windows Store game.
• If your game supports playing audio in the background, verify that your game continues playing audio in the background without getting suspended. Verify that your game continues to play audio when the user locks the machine.
• If your game registers for the transport controls to control playback of music, verify that it works as expected.

Different screen sizes

Windows 8 runs on a variety of screen sizes, from a small screen on a tablet, to a medium laptop screen all the way up to a large desktop screen. Therefore it is important to test your game on different screen sizes. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Windows Store Apps to test your game on a variety of screen sizes and pixel densities.

• On resolutions between 1024×768 and 2560×1440, verify that your game’s layouts are not truncated and that content appears where expected.
• Verify that images are crisp when scaled to pixel density.

Data roaming

Windows 8 enables roaming settings across multiple PCs, including the roaming state persisted by your Windows Store games. To test this:

• Verify that the game context roams as expected across multiple PCs. For example, this could be the last completed level in a game, the most recently read page in a book, or the last watched position of a video in your game. Verify that the context the game set on one PC is reflected when you use the game on another PC.
• Verify that the applicable user preferences for your game roam as expected across multiple PCs. Verify that the user’s unit preference set on one PC is reflected when you use the game on another PC.

Devices and sensors

If your Windows Store game supports devices or sensors, you need to verify these areas.

• If your game supports tailoring the view based on the geolocation, verify that it works as expected. You can use the Visual Studio simulator for Windows Store Apps to test this as it supports an option to set the current location.
• If your game supports responding to user-initiated device connections like a camera or USB drive, verify that your game correctly performs the action corresponding to that event. For example, this could be verifying that users can use your game to copy all the images from a camera. Also, verify that your game handles device disconnects gracefully. For example, this involves verifying how your game behaves if the user disconnects the camera while your game is copying images from the camera.
• Users can dock certain types of machines or devices to a docking station. Verify that your game behaves as expected both when the machine is docked and undocked.

Performance

Users expect games to respond immediately to inputs. So it is critical to verify the performance characteristics of your game. As Windows 8 can run on a variety of hardware, consider installing your game on a low end machine to measure its performance characteristics. The post How to improve performance in your Windows Store app has details on how to prepare a machine for measurements.

Responsiveness

• For the key scenarios supported by your game, understand the expected interaction classes and verify that the game meets the goals for that particular interaction class.
• Verify that your game remains responsive to the user.
• Verify that your game provides feedback to the user during any long-running activities, such as an asynchronous network call.

Being a good citizen in the game ecosystem

As the post How to improve performance in your Windows Store App explains, it is important to verify that your game is a good citizen in the game ecosystem. This involves contributing positively to the user’s overall experience (whether your game is in the foreground or not). In addition to verifying the areas that post lists, here are a few additional areas to verify:

• When in idle state, if you expect your game to not be using CPU, verify that the game doesn’t consume any CPU.
• Users could be on various types of networks including metered networks. If your game connects to the Internet, verify that it adapts its behavior for metered networks when sending and receiving data.

Error handling

As the saying goes, anything that can go wrong, will . Seriously, when a condition your game depends on changes, it can impact your game’s behavior. For example, your game needs to handle network connectivity not being available and decide on how to behave in this situation.

• Verify that your game handles error conditions appropriately. As in our example, network and/or device connectivity is a great way to trigger error paths in your game. Verify that your game follows the guidelines for managing connection state changes.
• Verify that the error handling is not intrusive and that your game displays only the critical errors to the user.
• Verify that your game provides actionable error messages to the user. See the guidelines for actionable error messages.

Reliability

Users expect games to work reliably and consistently. It is important to verify that your game is highly reliable.

• Verify that your game runs reliably across varied conditions and that it doesn’t crash because of unhandled exceptions.
• Verify that your game doesn’t leak memory or any other resources. To detect memory leaks in a Windows Store game, you can use the same methods that you normally use with other Windows applications.

After you publish your game to the Windows Store, you can use the Windows Store developer portal to review your game’s usage and quality data.  For example, you can view the data about exceptions, crashes, and unresponsiveness issues that your users encountered.  Consider using this data to fix the top crashes and hangs in your game.

Accessibility

Windows 8 is designed for a broad spectrum of people and is accessible to everyone regardless of their abilities. If your Windows Store game meets a baseline of accessibility, it can contribute tremendously to improving the accessibility ecosystem. If your game supports accessibility, verify that it meets the criteria described in Testing your game for accessibility.

Globalization and localization

If your Windows Store game is designed to be global, it can be localized for a variety of regions and markets. Windows Store games can use the configured language and display formats (date, time, currency, and numbers) to tailor their content. For example, if a user configures Japanese as the primary language on an English installation of Windows, and then launches a Windows Store Stocks game, the game can display all the related news articles in Japanese and additionally show info about the stocks trading in the selected region (e.g. Tokyo Stock Exchange).

If your game is localized, verify that it works for different locales and display languages.

• For the languages your game supports, use the Language settings in the Control Panel to add each of the specific languages as a primary language, and verify that your game tailors the content appropriate for that language.
• Verify that changing the language when your game is running or suspended works as expected.
• For the languages your game supports, verify that the user interface strings gameear as expected and don’t get truncated.
• Verify that any text shown in the game’s images is in the selected display language.

Processor architectures

A Windows Store game can be architecture-neutral or it could target a specific architecture.

If your game is architecture neutral, it can be tested on any chosen architecture.

If it is architecture specific, it needs to be tested on all the supported architectures.

• If your game is targeted specifically for Windows RT (ARM), verify its functionality on a Windows RT PC. You can find additional info on developing and testing on ARM in the blog post What you need to know about developing for Windows on ARM.
• If your game targets x86 and doesn’t separately provide a x64 package, verify that your game functions correctly on both x86 and x64 systems. This is because x86 games can run on x86 (32-bit Windows) or x64 (64-bit Windows) systems. Windows allows games targeted for x86 to run on x64 systems.

Verify suspension behavior of the game

Windows suspends your game when it is not in the foreground. In this way, Windows gives the foreground game better use of system resources and ensures that games in the background can’t drain the user’s battery. For example, during suspension, a Stocks game can persist info about the last stock that the user was viewing and the time range for a stock chart.

• Verify that your game reduces memory usage while it is in a suspended state. To view the suspension status in Task Manager, click More details in Task Manager to see all available options, and then click View > Status values > Show suspended status.
• If your game supports uploading or downloading of data in the background, verify that data continues to be transferred even when the game is suspended.

You can use Visual Studio to simulate the suspension/resumption of an game. To do this, select View > Toolbars > Debug Location.

Verify resumption behavior of the game

When your game comes back to the foreground, Windows resumes your game, and it continues from the state that it was in when Windows suspended it. It is important to verify that your game resumes gracefully.

• Your game could be resuming after being suspended for a long time. During this time, the displayed content and any network connections could have become stale. Verify that your game resumes and that it provides a visual indication about the state of its content.
• After your game resumes, verify that it can refresh its content and can reconnect to any network resources, as required. For example, after a Stocks game resumes, it can provide a visual indication of the time the data was last updated, and then go on to update the cached stock data so that the user sees the latest stock prices.

Verify termination behavior of the game

Windows can terminate a suspended game when the system is running low on resources. Additionally, your game can also get terminated when the user manually closes it, or signs out of Windows. Depending on how the game gets terminated, it is important to verify that your game restores the right game data when it is launched after a termination.

• When launching a game after Windows terminated it, verify that your game restores the context and state as it was before getting suspended and/or terminated.  For example, this could be the last viewed stock info and the selected duration of the chart that was saved when the game was suspended.
• When launching a game after manually closing it (by swiping from the top to the bottom of the screen), verify that your game starts with the default data.
• When launching a game after an unexpected termination such as a crash, verify that your game is still able to launch and that it loads the default data. To cause an unexpected termination for your game, in the Task Manager right click your game > Go to details > right click > end task.

For more details, see Managing game lifecycle so your games feel “always alive”.

Verify game behavior when not running

A Windows Store game can surface info to the user even when it is not running. So, it is important to verify that the below scenarios work as expected.

Tiles

Here are the main areas to verify when your game is not running:

• Verify that the default tile displays as expected. Verify that the tile size, usage, and notifications follow the guidelines in Guidelines and checklist for tiles.
• If your game supports scheduled notifications or periodic/push notifications from the cloud, verify that its tile gets updated even when your game is not running. Examples of this are a weather game that periodically updates its tile with the current temperature, and a sports game that updates its tile with the latest scores pushed from the cloud.
• A live tile is one of the best ways to entice users back to your game. Validate that the info in your live tile shows the best of what’s going on inside of your game.

Toast notifications

If your game supports toast notifications even when it’s not running (using scheduled notifications or push notifications), verify that the toast notifications trigger and display as expected even when the game is not running. Examples of this are a calendar game that schedules meeting reminders as toast notifications and a news game that displays breaking news as toast notifications.

Background tasks

If your game supports background tasks, verify the corresponding behavior.

• If your game is capable of showing lock screen notifications (e.g. a mail game or a VoIP game that always has to stay up to date), verify that the info surfaced by your game stays up to date even when the PC is not used.
• If your game can perform background tasks on certain triggers (e.g. a Photos game that processes pictures from the Photos library when on AC power), verify that your game performs that task correctly when the appropriate conditions are met.

For details, see the Background tasks blog post.

Conclusion

Testing your Windows Store game and verifying its quality is a critical step to ensure that your users have a great experience with your game. In this blog post, we covered a few key areas related to verifying your Windows Store games including verifying the behavior of your game when it is launched in different contexts, verifying the functionality of your game, and verifying the behavior of your game as it transitions through various states of the Windows Store game lifecycle.

In the real world, a user could combine many interactions that impact your game.  For example, a user could, in quick succession, snap your game to the Fill view, rotate the device, and adjust the screen resolution.  So, in addition to testing the game behavior for a specific scenario in isolation, bring out your creative juices and exercise your game to account for such complex interactions.

We hope you find this to be a good starting point to think about how to verify the functionality of your games and have them represent a high level of quality. In the coming weeks, we plan to do more blog posts that will dive deeper into specific topics pertaining to testing Windows Store games.

Thanks!

We’ve been amazed by the nominations we’ve already received for this year’s Critters, but to make sure we don’t miss out on a great site or developer we’ve decided to extend the nominating period nominations will now close at  23.59 GMT on Wednesday March 27th 

It’s really easy to nominate your favourite sites, apps and developers, just hop over to http://www.ubelly.com/thecritters and submit your choices (while taking a second to admire how good the critter looks in a top  hat) The categories are as follows:

• Indie Game of the Year - 2012 has been the year of the indie games developers. Which indie game blew you away in 2012/13?
• Developer of the Year – Without resorting to the cringeworthy phrase ‘rockstar developers’, it is clear that there are some amazing developers in our industry who constantly come up with new and awesome ways of doing things. Who’s your favourite?
• App of the Year - Whether it be web, mobile or desktop, which app stood above the others in 2012/13?
• Designer of the Year - There are so many ridiculously talented designers out there creating beautiful experiences for us to enjoy day to day. Who’s work has impressed you most in 2012/13?
• Voice of the Year - Across all the events, there are some speakers who really stand out, talking with a passion and knowledge that other could learn from. Which speaker got you inspired over the past year?
• Event of the Year - Which event was your dev/design London Olympics?
• Win of the Year - As simple as it sounds, what one action won the last year for you?
• Web Personality of the Year - While there are people who make their mark on the conference circuit, there are others who sit behind their screen and blog, create and share day to day. Who stands out in the community as a person who deserves recognition?
• Next Big Thing - Whether it’s developer, designer or just general web folk, which young whipper-snapper is going to come up and show us how it’s done in 2013?

We’ve got some great judges already lined up, including:

• Dan Oliver, editor of Creative Bloq and one of our industry’s leading voices. He used to edit .Net magazine and knows a lot about most things.
• AJ Grand Scrutton, CEO of Dlala Studios, all round indie gaming guru and one of the geniuses behind Janksy, one of our favourite games of the last year.
• Syd Lawrence,  co-founder of We Do Awesome Sh*t.  He lives up to his company’s name, most recently helping make the awesome Harlem Shake Roulette
• Keir Whitaker, co-founder of Viewport Industries, he helps produce resources which help web developers and designers know all they could ever want to about our industry.
• Sarah Parmenter, a world-renowned UI designer, Sarah designs website which look fantastic and are user friendly. When she’s not doing that she hops from place to place to speak at the world’s leading conferences.

So  what are you waiting for, get nominating now.

Interference was built by Nathan Beardmore in his spare time, but proved so successful that it was on the front page of the UK app store over Christmas. Here’s what Nathan had to say about the journey he went through to develop his app.

Interference started life a few years ago as a web game I developed in my spare time just for my friends and family to enjoy. We had great fun playing it, and a few players suggested it would work well as a mobile app, but I didn’t have enough time to develop an app at that point.

In 2011 my girlfriend was diagnosed with “Cancer of Unknown Primary” in her neck, which required several months of radiotherapy and chemotherapy sessions.  To give myself something to focus on and to keep my mind occupied during the sessions I set about developing Interference into a fully featured mobile app.

My background was first as a network manager and then as a Microsoft Certified Trainer for the Microsoft Certified System Engineer and Microsoft Certified IT Professional curriculums, so I’m tech savvy for sure; but had no knowledge of coding Windows Apps.

Both my girlfriend and I both have Windows Phones, and learning C# and XAML would be enough of a challenge for me to learn how to build, and see the app come to life.  In terms of the design of the app as the game is based around user generated artwork, I wanted the design of the app to be understated so that the user’s eye is drawn to the artwork.  This was the reason for going with the very basic grey and white scheme for the app. The Windows Phone and Windows 8 style guide of “content over chrome” is a perfect fit for an app like this.

I found some really helpful resources and Microsoft have really gone out of their way to make Windows Phone and Windows 8 an easy platform to start developing for. All of the tools are free, and there’s a wealth of information available on the MSDN website, personally I started by watching the series “Windows Phone Development for Absolute Beginners” videos on MSDN, and was really surprised how easy the development process was.

As it turned out, learning the languages was easier than I expected and I was able to get the app working fairly quickly and into the marketplace.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, I did face some challenges. At the core Interference is a turn based, multiplayer game, one of the biggest challenges I found was ensuring players knew when it was their turn and didn’t have to keep the app open 24/7 just to keep up with the competition.  However using the Notifications and Live tiles offer the perfect solution, allowing our server to send a pop up notification to players when there are new items for them to see. We have recently built on this, adding a feature where players are sent updates on the most liked drawings from the last few hours – these have proven really popular with our players, drawing players back in after their first play session.

With the great feedback and success on Windows Phone, as the Windows platform is not too dissimilar it was an easy decision to make to port the game over to Windows 8.  Taking the app from Windows Phone to Windows 8 was mostly issue free; there were a few challenges.  One such challenge was changes as to how the ink system worked. Fortunately, this was something I was able to get support with at the Windows 8 Bootcamp, which saved quite a bit of head scratching! Related to this was the difficulty of testing on a variety of hardware – for example, my budget doesn’t stretch to the purchase of a Windows RT device for testing. Again, Microsoft does provide support to help with this – I visited Modern Jago their space in London which has a device lab which developers can use to test their apps – worth the time spent on the train from my base in the West Midlands.

A main problem due in part to success of the game – due to Interference, by nature being  very bandwidth heavy, so server costs increase as more players join. I’ve recently started planning to move the game’s backend to Windows Azure to increase availability and reduce my hosting costs, leaving more funds to support the development of new features.

Since launch Interference has gone from strength to strength and we couldn’t more pleased, and we were lucky enough to have the app spotlighted on the front page of the UK store over the Christmas period, meaning we were one of the first things people saw when using their new Windows 8 devices they received at Christmas.

Has Nathan inspired you to build a Windows 8 game?

If you’re currently building or want to build or design your own apps for Windows 8 here’s some resources:

• Build a Windows 8 app in 10 minutes with ZipApp
• Collect points for publishing Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps to get rewards like TV’s, Windows 8 tablets and travel vouchers. You’ll get 10 bonus points for just signing up to the Rewards Programme between the 1^st and 14^th April 2013. Register today and start building.
• Sign up for a free Windows Store App Lab to get 1:1 design and UX guidance
• Head over to dev.windows.com and design.windows.com for all the resources you need to start building Windows 8 apps

We cast a beady eye over the show and picked out 5 of our favourites, will you be rushing to buy any of these devices when they’re released?

Nokia 720

It’s great to see more affordable Windows Phone 8 devices being released and what’s even more pleasing is Nokia don’t seem to have sacrificed style or functionality with their latest efforts.  The specs are impressive for  what is a sub £300 phone, with the 720 packing a 4.3-inch WVGA display, 1GHz dual-core processor, 512MB RAM and 8GB of built in storage, which pleasingly is complemented by a micro-sd slot.

Sony Xperia Tablet Z

Want to use your tablet in the bath with no fear of damaging it or electrocuting yourself? Then the Xperia Tablet Z is the device for you. And if you want more than just a novelty factor, the screen itself is a definite highlight, offering crisp clear graphics and impressively quick response times.

Nokia 105

Ok, so maybe you won’t be rushing to replace your smartphone with this little device. But for £13 we can think of no better phone to have lying around as a backup or for taking camping, to festivals or for a night out when you’re just not sure if you and your phone will survive in one piece.

Asus Fonepad

Ridiculously large phones seem to be all the rage nowadays and although the Galaxy Note 8.0 may have the ability to make phone calls, we were much more impressed by the Asus Fonepad which just about seems usable as a phone in our daily lives. We’d love to know who they do their user testing with – is there a secret race of giants craving bigger devices?

HTC One

Technology should be beautiful and this is the best looking phone we’ve seen since the Nokia Lumia 920 debuted. Everything about it screams class and we can’t wait to see the Windows Phone 8 equivalent that can’t be far behind. HTC don’t keep us waiting too long please.

Already have a killer app for iOS or Android? Head over to the Windows App Builder pages to find out more about developing and designing for Windows.

Everyone loves sinking their teeth into a game with real depth and Illryiad offers that in abundance, with the added bonus that it can all be played online. We caught up with founder  James Niesewand, to discuss cloud gaming and the benefits of hosting on Azure.

Q. Please outline your role at the company and a little about its history.

I’m the founder and CEO of Illyriad Games Limited, a 3 ½ year old UK indie game studio with one eponymous title.   Illyriad is an award-winning, free-to-play, browser-based HTML5 MMORTS set in a hand crafted, single shard continuous universe; so no random maps, no sharding, and no ‘server resets’.  IGN Gamespy described Illy as a “… huge, persistent fantasy world full of political intrigue, shifting alliances, warfare, questing, trading…” which I’d say is a pretty much spot-on accurate description of the game.

My day-to-day is split pretty evenly between administering the tedious but critical stuff of finance, planning, people and shareholder management, and the much more entertaining side of designing and coding expansions to the game.  I occasionally get out of the home “office” when I’m invited to speak at events – most recently at GDC Online in Austin a couple of months back.

Although I’ve always been a keen gamer, I had no previous experience of working in the games industry.  Before starting Illyriad Games my background was in a variety of roles and industry – most recently as Operations Director for a London-listed travel industry dotcom.  I guess Illyriad all started as part of an early-onset midlife crisis – it was either buying a red Porsche or writing a game    However, I really thought it was something I could put together and run successfully, and most importantly, would enjoy doing.

We’re now more than three years old and both the game and the company are going from strength to strength: we’re now over half a dozen members of the team, we’ve got more than 250k players, we’ve won awards, had great press coverage, received industry plaudits and – unusually for a first-time, first-title indie game studio – we’re not losing money!

Q. How was the initial idea for Illyriad conceived?

In 2008… during a fairly late-night and well-oiled conversation with a group of friends who were all moaning about the lack of anything really epic and involving in the empire-building strategy genre of late, and especially anything in the free-to-play business model.  We discussed our favourite games of all time and what we felt each game did best, and in a moment of madness I resolved to write my own game from scratch.

I began working on a proof of concept written entirely in HTML4, using classic ASP and MS SQL – the only few techs I was passingly familiar with!

Once I had something that looked like it might actually work, I convinced a proper coder, Ben Adams, to quit his full-time job and come on board as our CTO, largely to rewrite all the functional – but appallingly bad – code I had written myself and then move us forward into HTML5, MVC, websockets and Azure world.

Q. What was your inspiration for the design?

Epic, fun RTSes of yesteryear with a smattering of sandboxy goodness.  Our favourite games, the ones we reminisce about and from which we draw inspiration are Civilisation III, Alpha Centauri, Dune 2, MOO, Elite, Freelancer, HoMM, Ultima, Asheron’s Call & Eve Online.

In the press we’ve been described as “… the Eve Online of the free-to-play world“, and “…like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones; those great big epic stories” – both comparisons that we’re very happy with!

We also published a game design philosophy document at the very beginning which has been an essential benchmark against which everything we release is judged, ensuring that we hold true to certain core principles that are important to both us and our player base, such as not allowing “pay-to-win”.

Our design, however, isn’t static in any way – we constantly expand, update and add new features to the world in a continuous, iterative process.

Q. What’s your process for designing the user experience / journey?

At the gameplay end, in a sandbox game environment where there are no prescribed ‘endgame goals’ and no proscribed ways of playing – it’s very much up to the player to choose their own victory conditions, the design process is largely focused on balancing competing subsystems.

At the macro gameplay level, options such as Military, Diplomacy, Trade, Magic etc must not be permitted to unbalance the game when used either individually or together.  Even within those macro gameplay options there are hundreds of individual subsystems (for example our Diplomatic options include spying, scouting, thieving, sabotage, assassination, non-aggression pacts, confederations etc) that each requires an internal consistency and balanced gameplay between each option.

At the user experience end – which encompasses everything from the adverts they see to the landing pages they arrive at, from the sign-up and login screens to the in game UI and new player tutorial – we’re incredibly iterative.  We firmly believe in A/B testing things in a live context, and listening to the responses using both direct feedback from the player base as well as deep metric analysis.  It may horrify some of your readers to hear this, but we release code and content changes to live on (quite literally) a *daily* basis.

Q. What advantages does Azure offer you as a hosting platform?

When we initially looked at the various cloud options three years ago, we decided to bypass the cloud and go down the dedicated server route.  At that time we felt that the cloud not only looked too expensive for a start-up indie company to swallow but it would also present some fairly difficult – or at the very least, unknown – technical challenges for us to overcome.

As the game grew and our requirements for scaling became clearer, we revisited the idea of using the cloud.  We compared a number of the options available and trialled a number of different services, but it quickly became clear to us that the Azure solution was the natural choice.

Primarily it’s because we’re already a Microsoft development studio.  Our codebase is entirely MS (the game runs off MVC .NET with an MSSQL backend) and hosting on Azure not only means tighter integration between our naturally MS-led systems, but it also means that when we have a question or an issue that we’re not sure how to overcome, we can talk to the helpful and friendly MS tech teams to get an answer that fits not just the cloud infrastructure but also the game architecture.

Azure also gives us options that we want to use that are currently unavailable elsewhere, such as Windows Server 2012.

Q. How does Azure’s flexible options help you manage demand?

We use different elements of Azure in many different ways.  The Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network) has offloaded a lot of bandwidth from our servers and increased their reliability, as they now concentrate on delivering the core game rather than assets – that’s been a great quick-win demand-leveller.

Azure Cloud Services provides us with the websockets techology for our chat system and real-time communications with all of our players.  As an HTML5 MMO game, with continual bidirectional traffic between client and server, websockets is the ideal solution for us as it’s much more efficient and reliable than our previous COMET-style approach.  Moving to websockets was a breeze, as it comes packaged natively in IIS on Windows Server 2012.

We also use the Azure Service Bus for reliable consistent messaging between the different scaled-out cloud services; Azure Mobile Services updates our Windows 8 clients with live tile push updates, and provides built-in authentication with players’ Facebook, MS and Google accounts.

From a corporate perspective, though, the pay-as-you-go / pay-as-you-grow model is perfect for a small indie startup.  The flexibility of the options and pricing means that we’re not committed to expenses for services that we may not need right now, but we’re also not prohibited from deciding that we need them right now when there’s a sudden rush of demand.

Windows Azure’s flexible model is perfect for any of you looking to build a game or app which will live in the cloud – give it a go today.