Responding to Android Market Comments

The Android Market lets anyone comment on any of the applications available. Sadly there is no way to respond to a comment on the Market itself, so here is my feedback to your comments on Chaos...

by Neko_Noskire (November 28, 2010) ★★★★☆
This is what trading card games should have been like. A way to get out of the game would be nice.

Seems this comment was later deleted, but it still shows up on AppBrain. Adding a way to quit is actually quite tricky given the way the Android Activity lifecycle works with applications using native code. At the moment you can just press the Home button to go back to the home screen. This pauses the game and, assuming the OS does not kill the Chaos process, you can restart the game by pressing its icon again. This can lead to some surprising resets, though the alternative (always hard reset when you hit the Home button) is worse, I think. I don't particularly like games that do the forced hard reset anyway, it seems to go against the spirit of multi tasking. Or maybe Neko wanted a way to completely abandon a game that you'd already started? Hmm, that might be it and that would be doable. One for the list of things to do.

by Peter (November 21, 2010) ★★★☆☆
Pretty good, but needs landscape mode & speeding up; missing "attack" sound

I wonder if Peter uses an EVO 4G? Rumour has it that the frame rate is capped at 30 frames per second, which would cause Chaos to run slower than it should do. I use the frame redraw to sync the timers in the game, you see. As for the attack sound missing, I'll have to check that. Disclaimer: I often play with the sound switched off. Heh heh. The landscape mode comment is strange - just rotate your phone, the screen adjusts. Maybe I should lock the game to landscape only? The portrait mode version is not very useful as you end up with a tiny area to play on and big black borders at the top and bottom.

by Jon (November 20, 2010) ★★★★★
I now no longer need any other game. Awesome retro fun!

Thanks Jon! :-)

by Martin (November 1, 2010) ★☆☆☆☆
Naja, schwaches Game. Keine gescheite Steuerung :(

Translation: Well, weak game. No intelligent control. Er, okay. I think an '80s videogame magazine tautology will do here: If you don't like games like Chaos, then this game is not for you.

by Kieron (October 31, 2010) ★★★★★
YES! 1 of my fav Spectrum games that I still play on emus, Marvin works well but the keyboard mapping isn't great for phone. This port solves it! Thanks

This is why I wrote the GBA version originally too - I could play Chaos on FooN, but the controls were unwieldy. Almost a remake of a remake then.

by darren (October 31, 2010) ★★★★★
Amazing cool sexy fun ! Hint ! Kill the warlock on level seven by using your blood diamond in his water

Right... Not sure what darren has been imbibing (blood-diamond tainted water perhaps?) but at least he rated the game 5 stars. This may have been an odd sort of spam actually, it appeared almost immediately after uploading the game to the Market. I can't see what the spam is trying to achieve though. Very strange.

So there we go. Keep the feedback coming - Chaos is in maintenance mode while I hack on my next Android game, but I'll still add features if they sound good and aren't too tricky.