New word puzzle game - beta test?

Just installed it. Cool. How do I play?

And I'm a bit concerned about the first ad I got: A turd with glasses advertisting "The Poofessor Show". As clever as that is, i don't think it'll be approved 🙂

1080p is only available for the video plane. The graphics plane is 720p.

Checking out the game now. Looks really nice, but it wasn't very obvious how to play (more specifically to press Play/Pause to submit a guess, and that blue meant a letter was in the right place). Had you not said it was a "Mastermind" game, I wouldn't have had any idea what to do. A help screen probably wouldn't be a bad idea. Overall, very slick, though!

Looks great ! a help screen would really be nice... i saw that add with the Turd too...

a bit on the difficult side but great looking

INSTRUCTIONS:

To play: use the arrow keys to move the white cursor-box to a letter, and "select" to choose. Once you've chosen four letters, press either "play" or "fast-forward" to submit your guess. If you choose a wrong letter, use "rewind" to delete letters before submitting your guess.

For every letter that's both correct AND in the correct location, you'll get a blue peg. For every letter that's correct but NOT in the correct location, you'll get a yellow peg. The goal is to guess the hidden word before you run out of chances.

"TheEndless" wrote:
it wasn't very obvious how to play (more specifically to press Play/Pause to submit a guess, and that blue meant a letter was in the right place). Had you not said it was a "Mastermind" game, I wouldn't have had any idea what to do.

Yeah, I wrestled with in-game instructions. I wanted to keep the game compatible with the first-gen remote (which is the one I have), so I couldn't think of a good way to implement them in-game. Currently, the only place the instructions show up is in the full description in the Channel Store (which obviously doesn't help anyone who installs the game via my direct link). Hmm...I'll give it some more thought...

"RokuPatrick" wrote:
And I'm a bit concerned about the first ad I got: A turd with glasses advertisting "The Poofessor Show". As clever as that is, i don't think it'll be approved 🙂

Yes, I was curious to see the reaction to this guy. My plan was to use the ad space to promote various other projects I work on, and the Poofessor is definitely the most extreme! I'm okay to replace him with a different ad if you think he's a non-starter. I'll put a new ad up before I submit it to the Content Store.

But it begs a question. The ad graphic is located on a website, so I can dynamically update it anytime I want. But obviously, I don't want to risk uploading a new graphic that gets flagged as unacceptable. So is there anything else you can tell me about guidelines for what content can and can't be included, beyond what's in the Developer Agreement? Or is there any sort of recurring approval process for dynamic content like this?

"NanoZim" wrote:

"RokuPatrick" wrote:
And I'm a bit concerned about the first ad I got: A turd with glasses advertisting "The Poofessor Show". As clever as that is, i don't think it'll be approved 🙂

Yes, I was curious to see the reaction to this guy. My plan was to use the ad space to promote various other projects I work on, and the Poofessor is definitely the most extreme! I'm okay to replace him with a different ad if you think he's a non-starter. I'll put a new ad up before I submit it to the Content Store.

But it begs a question. The ad graphic is located on a website, so I can dynamically update it anytime I want. But obviously, I don't want to risk uploading a new graphic that gets flagged as unacceptable. So is there anything else you can tell me about guidelines for what content can and can't be included, beyond what's in the Developer Agreement? Or is there any sort of recurring approval process for dynamic content like this?

There's no ongoing approval content, though if someone raises an issue, we'll take a look. Porn, obviously isn't allowed, but I'd ask that you refrain from poop and other things that might come out of us.

Patrick

"NanoZim" wrote:
Yeah, I wrestled with in-game instructions. I wanted to keep the game compatible with the first-gen remote (which is the one I have), so I couldn't think of a good way to implement them in-game. Currently, the only place the instructions show up is in the full description in the Channel Store (which obviously doesn't help anyone who installs the game via my direct link). Hmm...I'll give it some more thought.

I was thinking something along the lines of a Help button, maybe just under the HogoWord banner, that the user could get to by arrowing up from the top row on the keyboard. Then, when selected, a popup window with brief instructions...?

Nice! I'm always impressed by slick looking interfaces. I so bad at it...

"RokuPatrick" wrote:
There's no ongoing approval content, though if someone raises an issue, we'll take a look. Porn, obviously isn't allowed, but I'd ask that you refrain from poop and other things that might come out of us.

Okay, how about this solution:

1. First, I changed the ad banner (you may need to reboot for it to update). I can keep these banners very innocuous, using safe imagery, and mainly limiting them to promoting an external link(s).

2. The link itself would take you a page that would contain many videos, including the Poofessor. But since none of the imagery or videos would be accessible directly from Roku, would this be okay? I'm hopeful this would be viewed the same as a YouTube or Amazon banner, since those sites also carry a range of videos, from safe-for-all-ages to more-mature (or in my case, more-immature). 😉

What do you think?

"NanoZim" wrote:

1. First, I changed the ad banner (you may need to reboot for it to update)

If you download the banner image to tmp:/ and use from there, you shouldn't have to deal with any of the caching problems. Then again, with all the talk about the Roku caching images, did anyone try setting last-modified headers to see if the Roku honored them?

"kbenson" wrote:
If you download the banner image to tmp:/ and use from there, you shouldn't have to deal with any of the caching problems. Then again, with all the talk about the Roku caching images, did anyone try setting last-modified headers to see if the Roku honored them?

Ah, I'll have to look into this. I'm still kind of a newbie at BrightScript...