Official page for the Dizzy Dwarves game.
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ADIB 73. With the last bug squashed like road kill, we embarked on another final round of testing. To give you an idea of what that involved, that was completing all 40 levels again to confirm everything was working as expected on all levels. At this point that was less fun!!
Absolutely thrilled to have had the opportunity to chat with the awesome Syndicate Y and talk a little bit more about our game and our journey in building it. Even better to be introduced alongside the new website! Check it out!
Syndicate Y Interviews - Interview with Pete and Jase from Dizzy Dwarves %dizzydwarves %mobilegame
ADIB 72. One trade off we had to live with however was a max speed we had to keep the game to in order to minimise our lag issues. For a game based on speed and reaction time, having to throttle our speed was frustrating. On the plus side, this max speed was still pretty fast!
ADIB 71. It wasn’t all bad news, some of the benefits to come out of our pain:
- rethinking some of our level designs, leading to a better product
- optimised code
- more efficient algorithms
- optimised assets leading to a much smaller app install size
Silver linings!
ADIB 70. As frustrating as it was to realise we had spent mths trying to fix something we had no control over, at least we now knew what we were dealing with! We could finally move forward trialling different solutions knowing the root cause. Way better than fumbling in the dark!
Today I learnt FTFY does not stand for F that F you… 😂😂
ADIB 69. After mths of fixing and testing, we had exhausted pretty much every idea we could think of... Then we discovered documented issues with CPU throttling when batteries overheated. It explained a lot of what we were experiencing - we had finally tracked down our gremlin!
ADIB 68. We went on this cycle of fixes for a while. The last bug was really annoying and took us mths of effort to diagnose and resolve. We were experiencing intermittent micro lags for some reason. With a game dependent on reflex and split second timing, it was a show stopper…
ADIB 67. After a few wks of fixing and testing, we finally appeared to get the dwarf’s motion back to smooth again. Aaand of course, just as we did that, we somehow re-inherited our old alignment issue. This would be a pattern we would become all too familiar with.
Here’s a Dizzy Dwarves montage with the character we created in honour of Ellen. Hunt us down on iOS and Android!
If you’re a fan of the game, one of our fans has created a subreddit for the game. Please feel free to join the community!
The (unofficial) subreddit for Dizzy Dwarves fans. If you’ve stumbled upon this indie mobile game, help me grow it!
Here’s a short glimpse of another level and enemy type from Dizzy Dwarves. If you love super challenging games, you will definitely enjoy this challenge!
These types of unsolicited positive reviews really do just make our day!
Privileged to have participated in an interview with the team at the Gamer Section. I enjoyed our chat and the chance to tell our story. Thanks for having me on the show!
JOIN US AS WE CONDUCT AN INTERVIEW ON THE GAME DIZZY DWARVES.WEBSITE: http://www.dizzydwarves.comTWITTER:https://twitter.com/DizzyDwarvesFor All of Our Other...
ADIB 66. After resolving the alignment issues, the next issue we faced was the dwarf movement starting to be a little jagged instead of smooth. Again this was mystifying. We had to work out whether it was the code, issues with a Unity upgrade or something else altogether! 😳
ADIB 65. Jase and I tried a few different things, between adjusting the code and tweaking obstacle placements to get around this. It was quite a frustrating and tedious process of tweaking, testing, re-tweaking, more testing, a lot of swearing and testing again!
ADIB 64. This slight shift also meant the dwarf was overlapping obstacles placed during game design and where our dwarf previously fit neatly into a gap between 2 obstacles, now it was slightly encroaching over an obstacle’s edge. Really annoying.
ADIB 63. One of the first bugs we encountered was an issue with the horizontal scaling where the dwarf shifted off centre as the player moved further left or right. This got gradually worse and meant when the dwarf was extreme left or right the dwarf overlapped our wall boundary.
ADIB 62. It was a frustrating year. Being so close to finished. I really felt for Jase who had to do the hardest part - to debug and try and work out what on earth was going on. If I wanted to bang my head in frustration I’m surprised he didn’t go through a bunch of monitors!!
ADIB 61. Part of development is banging your head over and over again, shouting HOW!?!?! Following the refactor the game was behaving strangely in ways that made no sense. This would mark the start of a year long process of bug fixing, testing and fixing further errors.
ADIB 60. With constant ad hoc fixes and tweaks, the code was in a bit of a mess and it was beginning to take Jase ages to fix bugs as a result. This was something that had to be done but it turned out to be one of our biggest hurdles and would delay our launch significantly.
ADIB 59. At this stage we were about 9 months in and things were cruising along. The levels were getting knocked over and I could see a pathway to launch within 6 months. It was at this point that Jase decided to do something major. It was time to refactor the code…😳
ADIB 58 - To provide an example of what I mean, this level started with the idea of trying to make something akin to a moving maze. So as you go along the level you have to essentially dodge moving ‘walls’ of snakes… We think it turned out pretty well, what do you all think?
ADIB 57. Each level I created started with an idea, from which I would base the lvl design around. Having exhausted all my initial ideas, it was impossible to force inspiration so it was now taking days and weeks. As Springsteen said: “You can’t start a fire without a spark…”
ADIB 56. One of the best things about making this game was having the opportunity to be creative. For a person who lives in a world of data, it was nice to dive into this aspect with level design. However as I got into the 20s lvls, it was taking longer for inspiration to strike!
ADIB 55. We then recorded a level so he could get a feel for the game and work out appropriate sounds and timings. He returned a video including sound effects so we could feed back on that. Eg. The rock smashing wasn’t explosive enough. Cody was really helpful and accomodating!
ADIB 54. A bit more of a breakdown of what was involved with the audio. After hunting down Cody, we got a NDA signed and then provided him with a list of everything we wanted audio for. He then provided us with a quote for all the work we wanted done (very reasonable by the way).
ADIB 53. Given our game took 3 years longer to build than I had anticipated, having a partner dev was invaluable. For the rest I’d estimate around $15k for all the artwork, animations, music, hosting, trademarks and fees. Dev costs would certainly have been the biggest $$ sink!
ADIB 52. One friend had worked with an offshore dev and while things started off well, when the inevitable tweaks and disagreements around scope came about, the dev demanded more money for something that was technically in scope and held the code to ransom unless paid $2k more…
ADIB 51. A few ppl have asked how much it cost to set up the game (and this will span 2-3 posts). Important caveat - I was clear from the start that I was going to partner with a dev for this instead of trying to pay for one. Too many horror stories of code being held to ransom!
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Here’s a Dizzy Dwarves montage with the character we created in honour of Ellen. Hunt us down on iOS and Android!
Here’s a short glimpse of another level and enemy type from Dizzy Dwarves. If you love super challenging games, you will definitely enjoy this challenge!
ADIB 58 - To provide an example of what I mean, this level started with the idea of trying to make something akin to a moving maze. So as you go along the level you have to essentially dodge moving ‘walls’ of snakes… We think it turned out pretty well, what do you all think?
ADIB - 30. It didn’t take long. We found a girl from China whose artwork we liked. We thought we’d test her out with creating our mythical ‘heart clouds’. I gave her some examples for what it could look like and let her go. She returned something in abt 2 hrs… Fully animated. 😮
ADIB - 24. Now that we had most of our assets created, it was time to think about animations. We started with the rock obstacles and asked our artist to create some animations of them smashing and crumbling. She did a great job but mentioned it took her a long time to create.
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