So, we’ve released version 1 of GemDrop on the Google Play store, it’s had a few downloads, not many, but enough to get a little feedback on forums from fellow game devs.

Let’s be honest, it’s really just a simple Tetris clone right now, so what can I add to make this a bigger more interesting game? And why have I already released it before even I class it as fun and done?

I’ll tackle the second question first. I released it because I feel it’s important to get your games out there to the public as soon as possible, that way you not only get technical feedback like whether it crashed or not and whether the screen layout works on other devices I don’t own so can’t test on. But also you start getting feedback from players on how I can improve the game going forward. Granted most feedback from players is something simple like “this sucks”, or “just a tetris clone”, but that okay, because on forums like reddits subreddit “playmygame” or the programming forums I visit, I  get better feedback, like “your game sucks and you should have used unity, not libgdx”, no really, I get better feedback and suggestions for what to add next.

So, going forward, I’m planning to add an online high score table, I’ve already done this with Invaders, so it’s no big deal and could be added in a few hours of work, I do see some crashes happening due to something related to the Google Play Service library, but I’ll hopefully be able to resolve those. I’ll also add some achievements, I think these are a good way to give the player something to aim at, and an easy way to retain players until they’ve completed them all (but I could keep adding more!!!)

What about more games? Well, I’m planning to do something even simpler for my next game, Mine sweeper. there’s a number of mine sweeper clones on the store and they’re all okay, and I love the game myself, it gets my brain in gear, and I could add features like letting the player select how big the board should be and the difficulty level. I’m sure there’s a publicly available algorithm for generating the board, so it shouldn’t take too long to do, and the graphics are pretty simple. I’ll do some dev blogs while I’ll work on it.

Bye bye for now, hope you enjoy playing our games and looking forward to reading any comments you have.

Download GemDrop now on the PlayStore