Cube Designer tool ( Facebook Instant Game )

@will

What would be even cooler is writing up what you did as a guide for anyone else interested in making an Instant Game. I’ve been meaning to do that myself for ages…

Since the start of the year, I try to get two days a week to spend on a few PlayCanvas projects - most of that time has been spent working around issues in Playcanvas ( mainly due to not having visual access to the hierarchy in an imported FBX ) and reporting bugs ( most of which seem to get ignored ).

Here are a few suggestions…

  • The PlayCanvas development team need to have a more visible presence in these forums - maybe have each dev take an hour every other day, and go through them to see if they can help.

Yaustar does an excellent job, as do some other developers, but the actual PlayCanvas dev team need to be doing this ( or hire a support engineer ). A lot of times, they seem to only post after someone complains.

  • Have an actual Bugs category, which could prioritize what your devs have to look at ( and could act as a triage for engine bugs reported to GitHub ).

This could also serve as a place to report UI bugs - the GitHub repo seems for engine problems only.

  • Take a few days out to update a number of the larger demos that were created by PlayCanvas for showcasing ( eg Swoop Tanx ) to use the current version ( they are currently Legacy, so can’t really be used as examples for new users )

  • Maybe have an AMA every few so often, to help increase customer engagement?

  • Fix the issue with playcanv.as/p/… breaking on iOS ( having to use the /e/p workaround )

I’ve had a PlayCanvas account for ages, but never considered used it for projects for a long time as I assumed it was too slow on iOS, due to the published link being broken on iOS.

I also recently gave a one day PlayCanvas course about a month ago to about 10 artists, one of the first things I do is show how quickly users can publish their content and see it on their mobile phones. On top of learning everything else, I then had to also tell the artists how to edit the published URL to include the /e, as it was of course showing the issues ( broken loading, bad aspect ratio, slow FPS ). Half of them had iOS devices, and most of them wanted to send the link to friends who had iOS devices - having to explain that this was currently broken, was reported, and would hopefully be fixed soon, is a step I’d rather not have to add.

  • Update the WebVR polyfill - quite a few people have asked for this, and have reported issues with the camera shaking ( due to radians / degrees change ) in Chrome.

This is a great example actually of many devs reporting an issue and asking for a fix, and it being seemingly ignored by the PlayCanvas developers*

*If this is a quick fix, can this be prioritized - or is there a reason why it hasn’t been done?

If you need examples of any of the above, just let me know.

Just to wrap up on the original question about writing a tutorial - a) I’m not sure if I’m doing it the right way, I want to try a few different methods to strealine the process, b) Up until now, four days game development takes me a month, due to trying to work around bugs etc, so I don’t have any spare time. c) It would totally make sense for one of your team to spend time doing this. If a tutorial had existed, it would have saved me about 8 days ( two months for me ).

Hope that all makes sense. Basically, take your good product and make it a great product. Also, the customer isn’t always right, but if enough of them are pointing out some issues, then maybe they aren’t wrong :slight_smile:

I’m not sure how many of the development community will agree with the points above, please feel free to share your thoughts…
Mal