For starters Pokémon: A Japanese franchise created in 1995, beginning as video games for Nintendo's Game Boy. Now Pokémon Go is a mobile phone game in the Pokémon franchise, relying on augmented reality.
Users play as Pokémon trainers to capture and evolve
Pokémon in the real world. The user
walks around outside, or inside, and looks for a Pokémon to capture. In
fact, Pokémon Go is already the biggest US
mobile game of all time, with 21 million active users. This craze
is exploding to other countries, just in few days of launching in Singapore it
had become most installed mobile game in Singapore so far.
Now pretty much everything negative or positive has been
said about the game already. But one thing we all agree is that it’s the beginning
of augmented reality gaming and the trend is most likely to continue in
different arena of mobile apps. After reading numerous posts and little bit of
hands on experience with this game (level 5 with 48 Pokémon collected so far) I
realised there are some interesting development lessons to be learnt here.
1. Testing & Quality is ongoing process
Its apparent that the game creators were not ready for the overwhelming
response. When it got out of control
over the initial craze and excitements, servers crashed several times, users
were unable to login, register or get necessary data while playing the app. With
numerous problems users experienced the company had to rollout several updates/
patches to sustain the situation and to keep the momentum going. This brings us
to the important aspect of any development: Test all possible use cases —
including geolocations, devices, operating systems, hardware, diverse
transaction etc. Quality is not about testing one time and blindly delivering
it to the users. Quality is about continuously testing and evolving to provide
error free user experience.
2. Validating User data
Crowd-sourced data is vital when it comes to building such augmented
reality game, however the data is naturally susceptible to human errors.
Numerous security issues and hassles were created because of pokestops in
strange locations which became international news. Data Validation: is the best
way to go about making sure the application developed did not create undesired
consequences / damages. Of course this
is easier said than done for application developers as it requires time and
effort in assuming all the possible scenarios and the most unexpected data
inputs. But I rather have an application delivered after few weeks than
delivering on time with unexpected consequences.
3. Front end matters
The front-end graphical user interface (GUI) of Pokémon depends not only
on the API responses, but also on mobile device hardware/sensor data. For
instance, in this case, the location of the player is determined
by location-based sensors GPS, which in turn determines the GUI behaviour
of the game. While I don’t deny that backend functionality or solid
foundation is the baseline for an app to succeed, I think it’s absolutely
important that your front end creates that seamless, error free usability and
features. Mobile apps are all about seamless user experience on different
platforms, devices etc. and its time that we give equal if not more importance
to the front end while developing apps.
There
are million possibilities for implementation and growth across all sectors using
augmented reality, and Pokémon Go is doing a fantastic job of giving us a taste
of it. Mobile application development has new benchmarks and also numerous
promises to fulfil as we go. This is why at PsiberTech Solutions, we sail
in with current technologies and trends to ensure outstanding results when it
comes to developing software applications for Business. To know more write to me or contact me in the
details provided below. Thanks for stopping by and have a fantastic day!
Srivatsan Aravamudan
| General Enquiries | : | info@psibertech.com.sg |
| Sales Enquiries | : | sales@psibertech.com.sg |
| Telephone | : | +65 62689551 |
| Fax | : | +65 62689858 |
Pre-Sales, Communications and Digital Marketing Manager
No comments :
Post a Comment