Help needed testing an iPhone game

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maurj

New Member
Jul 2, 2007
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Hi,

Myself and a friend have developed a free iPhone game, called "idrops". It's based on the Mac Classic game "MaciGame" (which is itself a version of "SameGame" - the original idea goes back years!). It's all good to go live, but unfortunately we don't have an iPhone (we're based in Europe) to test it on. Could anyone help us out?

It's designed to be played with the iPhone turned to widescreen, with the browser address bar hidden. If you're interested, the development site is here:

http://www.idropsgame.com/

Please do let me know what you think, and if it works! The main things we want to check are:

Does it work (at all) on an iPhone?
Does it display at full screen, or does it get scaled?
Is it obvious that you need to hide the address bar, and if so, how to do so?
Does the hover-over effect (highlighting the joined blobs with a white border) work when you put your finger near the screen?
Is it easy enough to click on the correct blobs - i.e. have we made the blobs big enough? (or do we need fewer blobs in the game?)
Is anything else missing?

This is what we're hoping it will look like (tested using iPhoney):

We've lots of other stuff planned, like high-scores etc., but for now we just want to get this out there for people to start playing! Oh, also, it works in Safari 3 on a Mac, and in Firefox and Internet Explorer, with big fancy graphics, so you can play it there too. But it's the iPhone we're really interested in testing with.

Thanks to anyone who can help :)

Dave & Tim.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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Sonikku

New Member
Jun 6, 2007
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The score and new game buttons render far to the right of the actual playfield (you have to scroll over a ways to see it).

I have no idea how (or if you can) hide the address bar, so I just play slightly zoomed out a bit.

Seems to play fine.
 
M

maurj

New Member
Jul 2, 2007
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Hi Sonikku,

Thanks for giving it a try!

Sonikku said:
The score and new game buttons render far to the right of the actual playfield (you have to scroll over a ways to see it).
Click to expand...
I've made a small change to the styling of the score area - it should be aligned just to the side of the main game grid now. Does this work better?

Sonikku said:
I have no idea how (or if you can) hide the address bar, so I just play slightly zoomed out a bit.
Click to expand...
No worries. Are the blobs big enough to click on when you play at the zoomed-out size? One option is that we have fewer blobs on the screen, or reduce the size of the blobs slightly so it doesn't need to be zoomed out. Unfortunately, we're working slightly blind, without an iPhone to test on! Any suggestions are much appreciated :)

Sonikku said:
Seems to play fine.
Click to expand...
Hurrah! Thanks :)

Dave.
 
M

maurj

New Member
Jul 2, 2007
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Thanks, iJohn / SteveK!

Since we're working blind, can I ask you both two main questions:

1) Does clicking on the blobs work well at the iPhone's screen size? We were worried that people might miss the blobs, or hit the wrong ones, if we'd done it too small.

2) Is it easy to make the game be "full screen" in the iPhone's browser? Not having used one, we don't know whether it's easy to hide the browser's address bar, or whether you have to zoom out to see the whole board (in which case, maybe we should make the graphics smaller?)

Any feedback like that you can give us is very much appreciated :)

Dave.
 
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SteveK

New Member
Jul 2, 2007
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playing

You have to resize it manually if you want it to be "full screen", or scroll it around, which is easy enough to do.

Clicking on the blobs to remove seems to work well, I didn't have a single issue where it picked the wrong one.
 
M

maurj

New Member
Jul 2, 2007
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I'm not actually sure if you can remove the address bar. The screengrab above is from iPhoney, a development program which is meant to emulate an iPhone. I don't know how accurate it is, as we haven't got an iPhone to test with.

Great news that the touch-screen seems to work well for selecting the blobs - thanks to everyone for testing it. I think we'll reduce the size of the images slightly, so that you don't have to manually resize it or scroll. I'll post back here when it's done - thanks!

Dave.
 
iPhool

iPhool

New Member
Jun 6, 2007
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ipheed.com
maurj said:
I'm not actually sure if you can remove the address bar. The screengrab above is from iPhoney, a development program which is meant to emulate an iPhone. I don't know how accurate it is, as we haven't got an iPhone to test with.

Great news that the touch-screen seems to work well for selecting the blobs - thanks to everyone for testing it. I think we'll reduce the size of the images slightly, so that you don't have to manually resize it or scroll. I'll post back here when it's done - thanks!

Dave.
Click to expand...

Some folks are having success getting around the address bar using window.scrollTo:
http://groups.google.com/group/iPhonewebdev/browse_thread/thread/c064b183c1207a98?hl=en
 
Marksman

Marksman

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Jun 4, 2007
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For some reason I am not getting the game to come up.

I get a very small graphic with a new game button. I zoom in and click new game. Then I have "Time Score" with 3 buttons below it, two blacked out, and one saying "New Game".

I can't get anything else to happen.
 
T

timdown

New Member
Jul 3, 2007
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How to play

RHJS said:
I don't even know how to play but seems like it worksomeone teach me please?:laugh2:
Click to expand...
The aim is just to get a high score. There are two main ways of doing this: by clearing as many blobs as possible and by building a really huge blob (each extra blob added to a group doubles your score for removing that group). It saves your best score in a cookie so you can keep on trying to beat it.
 
M

mlass

Member
Silver
Jun 19, 2007
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It's scaled to the upper left corner.

No time or score, just blank boxes.

"New Game" looks like "New Gan"

Also, slow response on WIFI and EDGE.
 
M

maurj

New Member
Jul 2, 2007
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Updated version posted

Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who's tried it out. We've just posted an updated version, which will hopefully scale slightly better. It also has a high-score feature (via a cookie for now), to remember your high score. Please do give it a try and let us know if it's any better!

http://www.idropsgame.com/

Dave.
 
8

818 drinker

New Member
Jul 3, 2007
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maurj said:
Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who's tried it out. We've just posted an updated version, which will hopefully scale slightly better. It also has a high-score feature (via a cookie for now), to remember your high score. Please do give it a try and let us know if it's any better!

http://www.idropsgame.com/

Dave.
Click to expand...
Scaled to small in the top right corner, also no sound. It also had a bit of a lag.
I tried it on windows pc, worked perfect, except no sound.
 
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