Trolldom Developer Diary

Insights from Trolldom workshops with 9-year olds

Today I did two more trolldom workshops. This time at 9-year old daughter’s school. Two session of 45 minutes with about 25 children each. Two kids shared each iPad.

I asked them some basic questions and was surprised:

Almost every single kid plays games
Almost every single kid had access to an iPad or iPhone
Almost every single kid had their own mobile phone (might be a basic one)
Most managed to start and play the game without any assistance at all (and didn’t want to stop playing it).

I spoke briefly about game development, then they played the game with minimal assistance on iPads, in groups of two. After this we programmed a troll together. I used a MacBook on the projector and they could see and try the trolls instantly on their iPads and we were discussing what to try in the code.

Here are my insights from the game / product:

Many kids finish the entire free portion of the game in about 15 minutes! That was surprisingly quick! Some kids had already played it though.
They often miss the next-button at bottom right of the screen. Even if it’s red and animated! I think it’s because of eye focus and viewing angles:

They focus on the center of the screen while the next-button is in bottom right corner
They use iPads (that have bigger screens) = button is even further away from where they focus their attention
Kids are closer to the screen than grown-ups because they are shorter

Naming troll in the silly trolldom style is a lot of fun. They make up silly or cute stuff. Make explore this in the product somehow? Voting for names was fun.
Eyes are a lot of fun. Huge eyes, tiny eyes etc. Game should have more types of eyes! Faces are important.
They are really into the troll codes and writing them on pieces of paper. They can’t believe it when I explain their troll can be played with anyone in the world. Maybe getting a troll code can be a huge motivation to download the game?
Doing crazy stuff with the troll is fun: make a troll eye animate far too quickly, huge body parts. “SET IT TO 1000!!!”.
We accidentally made a troll you couldn’t finish because the power button was revealed behind something else so you didn’t see it. Then one kid realised you could press it anyways – an easter egg / secret. They though that was amazing! Only they knew the secret. Secrets are fun!
I programmed on projector but they could each see and play with the draft troll on their iPads while we did this. That was great and generated a lot of WOW and laughing.
Playing with light and dark and sun settings was a lot of fun
Stickers still rule in 2016

I need to figure out what of this should go in the product next.

Here are the two trolls we made! Enter the 4 character code into FIND TROLL in the game to try them!

0EE8 Sverige Snurran 2
1E75 Rödgrön Tuppkam 2

/Marcus

Trolldom - Unity - 2D Images

Quick report: tying up all lose ends before the release of Trolldom. Yesterday I went through all menus and UI and cleaned up the layouts and made symbols more consistent.

Today I’m trying to make the on-boarding book look better. It’s been looking very… gritty.

Original PNG

Ugly in-game texture

The problem here is that there are 7 really big images of the troll book that don’t work well with Unitys lossy compression. I can scale down the image which makes it use less memory but makes it blurry. If I turn off the compression the game becomes +20 MB in download size.

After much research and experimentation I think I worked around it. I use a trick where I suffix all my PNGs with .bytes, like “tap_page.png.bytes”. This hides the PNGs from Unity and includes that PNGs in the build just as they are. At runtime I load the PNGs manually and create textures from them. Looks perfect AND small download size!

Tell me if you want my code for this.

Trolldom Makes GIFs!

A fundamental idea with Trolldom is that you can program your own trolls and share those with friends and on social media. Beta 5 got the share feature working to Facebook - it posts a nice 1920 x 1080 image of your troll, stamped with its 4 character troll code.

Right now we’re trying to get GIFs working. They are small and ugly compared to the HD picture but a lot of fun:

I really want to have both share features: share GIF and share HD image…

Right now the GIFs are 320 x 320 pixels, 10 frames/s and 6 seconds long. This makes them about 2 MB to upload. What do you think, is that a good format for GIFs?

In the Trolldom game there is a small virtual troll computer that runs each troll puzzle. You can reprogram it yourself to make new trolls or mess up existing ones!

The troll computer has virtual input-output chips - things like sprite chips (graphical 3D objects), animator chips (controls motion and animation over time) and a bunch of other stuff.

The troll computer has 256 bytes of memory that you can directly read and write from your troll script.

Most of the 256 bytes are mapped to the virtual chips. By reading and writing the corresponding memory cell, the chip is updated and the change will be shown on screen directly.

This was how you programmed computers in the early days of the personal computer - the days of Apple II, Commodore 20 - before there were proper operating systems. Your programs directly controlled the hardware.

Full documentation for the troll computer and tutorial videos etc: http://hackerdocs.trolldom.se

www.trolldom.se

/Marcus