The Last Week

Posted on February 8, 2013 by frontlinefire

Arcadecraft has been on sale for about 8 full days now and we are currently looking at a good 1775 scores up on the board. It has been a great start and we are really happy where the game is at the moment!

We have been cranking away on the mini update to the game that is intended to fix the Code 4 issue a number of people have reported. Yesterday we had a tester playing through the entire game which was hooked up to the debugger so we could track down any issue he would find. Unfortunately all that happened was he had a good 6-7 hour long game without problems.

Today however, Sam encountered a crash and thinks he may have found and fixed the root cause of the problem! Great news if he is proven to be correct.

In terms of where we are at the moment, here is a list of things we have fixed so far:

The Angry Gamer no longer spawns when the player is in the menus.
Alex Hoarder no longer always asks for your oldest machine.
Alex Hoarder selling Code 4 crash is fixed.
The new music track is in.
Multiple 8-bit music jingles have been added to the various game genres.
Memory savings and performance gains via texture atlasing.
Neon has seen a minor update.
4 of the 6 new machines are complete.
Some textures are higher res.
Other minor bug fixes.

Hopefully we can get this update into Peer Review mid next week so we can get you a better experience with more content sooner.

Other than that we wanted to share a couple new things!

Here is a render of what the new location may look like! Some of it is textured already but we wanted to show you it without the patchwork of materials.

It is a good chunk larger inside and currently has two pillars that you need to work around. We would like it so you can break one of the pillars down for a good deal of in game money.

We are also happy to announce that someone at Microsoft has been more than kind and decided to feature us on the Xbox dashboard! Special thanks to @masterblud for supplying the image!

Interesting tidbit. The scoreboard supports only 2000 scores and we may hit the limit this weekend. To get on the board after all 2000 places have been taken we assume players are going to have to start working a little harder! The new update will raise the scoreboard limit to a much higher number!

Keeping Score

Posted on February 6, 2013 by frontlinefire

While we are writing this there are now 1431 scores on the Arcadecraft Scoreboard! It has been steadily increasing since the game went live at around 215 new scores per day. It is really great that so many people have been playing the game and enjoying it.

There are also some pretty amazing numbers up on the board, with Random Fires being the first to $1,000,000! It also seems a good deal of players on the board are also in the high six figure range which is pretty awesome to see! It more or less proves that many people really understand the game mechanics.

However, there have been a few people confused or concerned when it comes to how the scoreboard is represented, and we don’t really blame them.

As crazy as it sounds it took us a while to nail down what we wanted to do with this tracking system and in the end we probably settled on a design that didn’t really work and got a bit worse when we took out one of the more important features.

What the current design is:

The Gamertag of the player, the date of their CURRENT game, and then their best total gross in a single playthrough.

This creates confusion as it seems as though a player in May, 1981 has $500,000. That simply isn’t the case.

What the design was meant to be:

The Gamertag of the player, The name of their arcade, the date of their current game, and their best total gross.

As we approached the end of version 1.0 of the game we got concerned that the swear filter wasn’t strong enough and there were ways a person could be clever (or obvious) and get around it, so we hid the arcade names which kind of broke how the date works in terms of design.

If you were tracking a good player and they had “Hamster Arcade” and made $500,000 by the end of the game, and then you saw that they changed the arcade name to “Laser Arcade” and were currently on Feb of 1982, you would mentally know that they opened up a new space and were going again.

Since the arcade name got dropped the confusion got worse, even though it probably still would have been confusing anyway. We needed to keep the date active as well otherwise all of the dates would simply represent the end date of the game, and then no one would know if that player had restarted their playthrough.

What the design really should be:

The Gamertag, The name of their arcade, the date of their current game, their current gross, and their best total gross.

That way you could see if a player had a chance of beating their best total gross in their current playthrough.

Now there isn’t enough room on the current board for all of that info, but there is if we drop the column where the arcade names would have resided, and we may do that sooner rather than later.

Post Launch Systems

Posted on February 4, 2013 by frontlinefire

The Good News!:

After its release on Xbox Live Indie Games, Arcadecraft has put more than 1000 scores up on its high score board in less than 5 days! It has also bested the previous 14 months of scores from our previous game, Orbitron: Revolution in less than 4 days! We have also been getting very positive reviews from a number of outlets who have run coverage of the game as well as receiving many fantastic emails from a number of users.

The Bad News!:

While the game seems to be selling well and word of mouth has been incredibly good we have received word from a few dozen people that they have been encountering Code 4 crash errors!

We take this sort of thing very seriously here at Firebase as we want our customers to have the best experience we can offer. As a company of only two people building a game with so many complex systems interacting with each other, as well as a variety of edge cases and eventualities that the player *could* encounter, it has proven to be a very difficult game to test thoroughly. Even the multiple App Hub Playtests and Peer Review sessions didn’t catch what we have been hearing about.

We think that many of these issues are ones that appear when the user is doing something mechanical such as moving or manipulating a machine while the Angry Gamer is beating on a machine or while the Game Collector is trying to buy a game. Even combinations of these or any of the multiple events may be triggering these crashes. We think long play times are also effecting what is happening in the game. 3 – 4 solid hours of play may be tripping the game up.

This is our responsibility to fix! So far we have been personally responding to every email we have received to try to get more information about what is being encountered. Thankfully, we have not heard of a single instance where gameplay save data was corrupted. At worst people have said that they have lost a couple of minutes of play time.

If you have seen or encountered a crash there is some information we would like to get from you:

Where are you located (Canada, US, France, etc)
What is the current date in the game?
Approximately how long have you been playing for?
What machines do you have?
How many machines do you have?
Is there any event currently playing such as Bobby Danger, Alex Hoarder, or other?
Do you currently own a seasonal item like Pumpkin or Christmas Tree?
Have you seen any messages that suggest you can’t buy a machine when you have the space and money for it?
Have you seen any strange things such as invisible Avatars, Machines, or your selector spontaneously changing?
Can you replicate the error consistently?

You may send this information to us via email at FirebaseIndustries@Hotmail.com

We REALLY want to hear from you!

The Better News!:

The plan moving forward is that we are going to move headlong into an update to the game that will hopefully fix many of these errors you may have been getting, which is why we need a bit of your assistance.

We are hoping that much of this can be fixed within the next 7-8 days and then move the game back into Peer Review so the update can be passed back to you!

In addition to the fixes we are going to add a tiny bit of new content to the game to add value back into it, and hopefully make the wait a little less painful.

You should expect to see:

6 or so new machines.
New audio jingles for each genre of game and some altered sound effects.
A fall animation for the Angry Gamer when you kick him/her out.
A new music track.
Better game performance.
Some miscellaneous art props.
Angry Gamer will not spawn during conversations or while in menus.
Controls on Isometric views to be fixed or altered.
Fix the Game Collector so he doesn’t always want your oldest machine.

This update is meant to be small, and completed fast, so we can get you playing Arcadecraft with confidence. A much larger content update is planned to be embarked upon later assuming the popularity of the game continues to increase.

Click the Roadmap to see possible upcoming features!

Thank you very much for your patience and support as we work toward bringing you a bigger and better Arcadecraft!

In the News!:

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/03/take-control-of-an-80s-arcade-with-arcadecraft-out-now-on-xblig/

http://www.blisteredthumbs.net/2013/02/arcadecraft-wasting-quarters-on-x-box-live-indie/

http://thriftynerd.com/2013/02/arcadecraft-a-diamond-in-the-xblig-rough/

http://www.defunctgames.com/courant/701/arcadecraft

http://www.mindofthegeek.com/2013/01/31/arcadecraft-review-a-daring-nostalgiac-trip/

http://twinfinite.net/blog/2013/01/30/featurama-an-interview-with-firebase-studios/

Arcadecraft Now Available on Xbox Live

Posted on January 31, 2013 by frontlinefire

Thats right! Arcadecraft has been released and is on Xbox Live Indie Games for download!

CLICK THIS LINK TO BUY!

The full press release can be found here: http://firebase.ca/press/

New screenshots can be found here: http://firebase.ca/arcadecraft-screenshots/

We hope you enjoy it! We also really want to hear your questions, comments, or strange things you found in the game so go to the contact page and email us.

Boot Up Sequence

Posted on January 24, 2013 by frontlinefire

We thought that we should give people an update on how things are shaping up on Arcadecraft!

Arcadecraft was put into Peer Review about two weeks ago on the Microsoft App Hub. It was sitting at 91% through the process after about 5 days of being available for App Hub members to test out. During this time, one reviewer found a problem in how the game handles memory (it runs out). The issue discovered was quite rare, and only reveals itself after around 3 straight hours of play.

In a bit of a panic we went looking to see what was causing the problem with the game that we thought we had previously solved a few posts back about optimizing our artwork. Turns out that the way we went about handling our assets caused an incredible memory bloat. Once it was known we did an 18 hour or so mad rush of work where we were able to solve the memory problem completely! In fact it solved it so well that there is now room left over for a good 30 or so more machines in the game, that we can add if/when we do an update! The savings were also so great that the overall game smoothness has been improved and we were able to load certain higher res textures back into the game!

However, as it was unknown what would happen if the original build hit 100% in Peer Review and we had the updated fix available in the meantime we decided to pull the previous build from Peer Review. This caused a full week penalty from being able to submit the game to Peer Review again! We did this simply because this new build is the far better experience than the older one and we would much rather you play something that isn’t going to fail on you.

Well, the week long penalty is over and Arcadecraft has once again returned to Peer Review! If it is able to pass through the process by Monday or Tuesday you may be playing the Xbox 360 version of the game as early as the 31st of January! We certainly hope this is the case and if so you can expect a press release, new media, an updated FAQ, roadmap, price, and a game to play!

In other news, last weekend (Jan 19th) Firebase Industries attended the Vancouver Film School Game Design Expo. At the event we had a table set up with the latest build of Arcadecraft as well as Orbitron: Revolution! A great time was had and we talked to a good number of people about our games and recieved some fantastic feedback!

Arcadecraft Cover Art

Posted on January 8, 2013 by frontlinefire

This is what you should see appear on Xbox Live Indie Games in the near future!

We are in the final stages of playtesting and moving into Peer Review within a few days. All being well Arcadecraft should become available soon!

Thank you for following development of the game! It has been a little over 10 months since we started and can’t wait to get the game in your hands!

Arcadecraft in Playtesting

Posted on December 28, 2012 by frontlinefire

Arcadecraft for Xbox 360 has entered the Playtesting phase on the AppHub site for XNA members! We are already getting all kinds of really good feeback about the game and how the design goals are being communicated to the players.

Some content is still being added to the game as well to help reinforce certain game mechanics and completely flesh out the visuals. Studio X is once again supporting us with in game audio and much of it has been integrated so far. We recently modified the camera so that it can pitch up and down, getting you closer to the action! Everything is coming together really well and we can’t wait to get the game in your hands!

Thank you for your interest and support of Arcadecraft!

Here are some new cabinets that have been added recently!

Firebase Industries

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