The quality of a developed game mostly depends on the final polishing. Polishing is basically a stage in development where the game is improved in every possible aspect to provide maximum user experience. There is no limit to such improvisation. Most game developers allocate a major time period to polishing.
In the polishing stage, the game should be ready for release. Most of the time, the developer faces a time crunch at the end of the development process. Polishing takes a significant amount of time. There are many examples where the developer chooses to polish the game after release. However, it is not recommended from the user experience and retention point of view.
The polishing job is carried out by the full development team, including designers, artists, and developers. It is the responsibility of the product manager and producer to ensure the target polishing level of the game.
Many developers choose to carry out play testing with a significant but limited number of users. Then, the issues and improvements are charted down for polishing. There are several approaches to polishing an Android game used by developers. We will discuss the general and widely used methods and practices of polishing in this chapter.
We will have a detailed look at the following topics:
- Requirements for polishing
- Play testing
- Taking care of UX
- Android-specific polishing
- Game portability
Polishing any game defines the quality of development. So, it is absolutely necessary to polish any game before releasing it in the market. A polished game performs far better than unpolished games in terms of visibility, smoothness, and user experience.
Polishing Android games covers all the three development components of a game:
- Development polishing
- Art polishing
- Design polishing
Polishing the engineering or the technical aspect of the game development process to improve smooth playability of the game is the main target of development polishing. This section includes programming optimization, memory optimization, and stripping unnecessary code blocks to avoid any extra processing.
Development polishing can be further split into three phases:
- Memory optimization
- Performance optimization
- Portability
We have already discussed memory optimization in detail in the previous chapter. Memory optimization ensures that the game runs with minimum memory usage. In a way, it helps a lot to increase device support and game stability. A good game must have excellent memory management so that it can run smoothly even with limited memory capacity.
Game art is polished during this phase. The main target in polishing the game art is to provide better visual quality within the same art space.
Game art is the initial driving force of the game. So, the polishing of game art may create or destroy the future of the game in the market. Especially for Android, where a wide range of device variations are available in the market with different visual quality, game art polishing becomes extremely useful.
There are mainly three phases of art polishing:
- UI polishing
- Animation polishing
- Marketing graphics
UI drives the game flow. So, the UI art should convey the desired path easily for users to roam around within the game. Thus, it becomes absolutely necessary to polish the UI art accordingly.
Almost every game uses animations for various purposes. Polishing animations means increasing the visual effectiveness and make a user see the game from a developer's point of view. Mainly for sports games, FPSs, and RPGs, animations are inevitable. Animations decide the character of gameplay.
It may be a general concept that design is a phase of preproduction and can be improvised during production. However, it is very important to polish up the design after development so that the final application can have improved quality. It has five phases:
- Designing UX
- Polishing the game flow
- Polishing the metagame
- Game economy balance
- Game difficulty balance
UX is the overall playing and browsing experience of a game from the user's point of view. There are several cases where a game failed to retain users because of poor UX designing. So, UX has to be polished with the help of actual user behavior.
Often in the game development process, the game flow might contain some unnecessary loops or actions. Users should have the maximum experience of the game with minimal action. Each action should be simplified enough for the users to understand without any tutorial. However, it is not always possible to simplify the game flow to that level. But it should be simplified enough to make it easy to understand.
A metagame is basically the container or packaging of the core gameplay. Polishing the metagame means polishing the packaging so that the game becomes more interesting and engaging for users. The metagame is also responsible for monetization. So, an extremely well polished metagame increases the chance of success in terms of revenue.
Many developers used to polish economy balancing along with metagame polishing. However, there are many aspects that need to be taken care of separately, depending on the core game model. Almost every game has an economical aspect associated to it. This aspect should be balanced throughout the game to keep users moving and give them a sense of progression.
As they say, all the fingers on a hand are never the same. Similarly, user efficiency is also not the same. It is the most likely thing to vary, and is reflected on the game leaderboard. So, the difficulty of the game should be balanced in a way such that almost each and every player has a chance to keep playing the game.