Before publishing your game.

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Before publishing your game.

As I try games published in the GM forum, I often wonder if the author has actually tried their own creation, perhaps in the excitement of the moment they have forgotten to check that everything works.
Now I'm not saying that every game should be brilliant, lets face it, few people produce stunning games, most of us produce mediocre games, that if the idea is good can still be fun, and some people produce really appalling games where half the keys do not work and you cannot work out what is going on.

The point I am trying to make is that even if a game is quite simple, with an often repeated theme, if it works well with good instructions it will still be fun to play. But a game even with the most original idea ever, will be useless if the controls do not work properly.

So what can you do to prevent your game being deleted five minutes after it has been downloaded?
Firstly you need to test your game thoroughly, if you have an options menu, check that all the options work correctly and then play your game from beginning to end, give your self unlimited lives if necessary to complete the game, check all the powerups etc work, check you can actually kill the enemy, or attain your objective, test, test, test.

You will probably find that you are bored with your game by the time you have finished it, this is normal, few authors play their own games, because they know them inside out. I only use two of my own creations Mouse Cleaner, because its handy and Squarepuzzle because I created it for my own use anyway.

Once you have checked your game thoroughly, look at its structure, has it got a title page and a game over page, does the game restart when the player loses or finishes the game, few things are more annoying than a game that exits to Windows when the player dies.

Has the game got a help file, which tells the player the objective of the game and the controls, it should also give the authors web site address if possible.

When placing the game on your web site have you considered making the editable available as well as the exe, this can be very helpful to people with 56K dialup connections (myself included).

If you do make the editable available I would advise checking the box in the Game Options titled --treat uninitialized variables as value 0 --, as sometimes editables will not run properly on other machines without this box ticked.

So finally in my opinion its the little touches that make a game playable, all the flashy graphics and sound effects are of little consequence if the game does not have a solid foundation.