We’re only a few days into the alpha phase of development on Litter Larry, and things are already humming along at full throttle. Like any good part of development, the first thing we did was spend about 4 hours planning. There was much sorting through and prioritization of all our bugs. So far we’re estimating about a four week long endeavor before submission that will include bug fixing and gameplay refinement.

I started our actual work by going through the A bugs that I knew I would be able to knock out quickly, which turned out to only be a few for now. Most of the A bugs that remain are contingent upon getting a hold of more devices to test on, lengthy testing sessions, or art dependencies. I’ve moved over to our B bugs so that we’ll have more fixes in place while we’re hammering away at those tougher issues later.

Most of the highest priority B bugs have to do with our integrations of Game Center and Play Services. These have by far been the largest timesinks throughout development. If no one uses these leaderboards, I think I’ll have to go find some mountains to meditate in for a while. It’s not worth delving into too deeply here, but between both services, which are controlled by moderately platform agnostic code, there are just a lot of edge cases to account for, not to mention the unexpected fun that you can’t even see coming.

At one point I spent at least three hours scouring logs, forums, and docs trying to figure out why there was suddenly no way to connect or load data from Game Center, even after resetting the phone, only to have it suddenly start working again with no explanation. It’s hard to convey that feeling of uneasiness that comes when a problem is solved and you have no earthly idea why it existed in the first place, let alone went away. Later, after ironing out what I thought were all the kinks in our implementation, I came to find out that Apple doesn’t really want you to allow the user to actively “log in” or “log out” of Game Center the way you can with Google Play Services. Much to my chagrin, this is how I had set everything up after my first pass. I had to slog back over all that same work so that now our settings button simply sets the user’s preference for logging into game services at the appropriate times. Truly riveting.

Overall I’m still feeling positive about the level of quality we will be able to hit after this last phase of development. Even the fun stuff above is fairly typical in my experience, so onward and forward! Many a bug awaits.

Latest Bug Count

A:8 B:16 C:14 D:8