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Now in the App Store: XG Mobile for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch!!!

Posted By: smcrtorchs
Date: Saturday, 28 July 2012, at 3:26 p.m.

In Response To: Now in the App Store: XG Mobile for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch!!! (eXtreme Gammon)

Well being a backgammon fun and owning iPad iPhone and iMac I gave it a shakedown. I have never played before with xg as there is no xg for macs. Very nice program. Below are my ideas for small optimisations.

1) While in tutor mode and after xg issues an error warning telling the player to reconsider then if the player does not push the play anyway button but does anything else and afterwards plays the same move he played initially then should not ask the player if he wants to reconsider again. If the player inserted the same play twice in his device it means that he made his choice and the second time question ends up tiring after a while.

2) On the iPhone version you could consider making the tap sensitivity greater for points that do not have checkers of the same player close to them. Let me give an example:

Assume player A has checkers on his 13 point but not on his 14 and 15 and he rolls a 42 to play. He then taps on his 12 point. Since there are no checkers on points nearby this should be a clear enough signal for the game to move a checker from the 13 pt down. As the iPhone screen is small it is very easy to tap close to where you want but not exactly where you want. On iPad with its bigger screen this is not really necessary.

3) I had a problem switching on and off the settings on/off switches on iPad and on iphone. I think you should either make them bigger or play with the sensitivity of the touch there a bit, because i might press them a lot of times and they do not switch.

4) You might want to evaluate the move of the player before he makes it and not after unless the frames per second for the moving checker animation drop really low. No point for the extra wait there. It does add up after some games.

5) I am sure you would not want to do this, but I will still say it lol. The appearance of the checkers should be plainer. The screen just looks smoother and cleaner with plain checkers. People might not really care a lot for this as they do not care if the quality of the burger in mac donalds is high or not. Still the quality in Mac donalds could be better and the first view of your board could be cleaner as well. While those checkers at the moment serve the purpose of making your product very easily recognisable, I still believe in the long run you would benefit from such a change. True you can change the checkers to something plainer however it is the first view that counts the most and it should be as good as possible.

6) The tutorial at your very first try when u open iPhone version is not really visible and people will bypass it. Which I actually believe is good for your sales. The controls to make the basic plays (tap checkers and slide the checkers to move them and tap the cube to double) are intuitive enough, but the advanced controls (swipe up and tap the dice to change their order, are not intuitive at all) They confuse users at their first interaction with the game and they will be gone trying something else. You can still have them, but do not display them at the first interaction of the user with the software. Mobile users are the exact opposite of dedicated backgammon lovers. They will not really try to play your game if you make it difficult for them.

7) It is not 100% clear to me what is your target audience which is actually bad for any product. It looks like you made a try to target dedicated backgammon players firstly and have casual mobile players as your secondary audience. This makes sense as the dedicated players are those that will spread the word I believe that you should publish a direct premium version of your app that is listed under the paid apps. I am sure some people would not really like to bother with the procedure of going through a free version to upgrade and would just prefer to go straight downloading the premium. Also having exposure to the paid lists can happen and why not try it (especially the very first days that your product is out). Moreover to people who do not know extreme gammon they might believe it is more serious if it also has a paying version.

8) The very small numbers that appear on the dices when you roll doubles should either be visible for both players or not appear at all. Of course this is a really small detail, but so are the numbers that appear.

When and if the Mac version comes out the integration will be great

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