Working with AI
Learning paths through this topic
The daily reward streak resets for players who did nothing wrong
Someone collects every day and still loses a ten-day streak, or collects twice in one evening. The cause is how the game decides what a day is. This entry settles it, including travellers, clocks set backwards and the hour when the clocks change.
Dragged puzzle pieces snap to the wrong spot or onto one that is already full
On a phone, fingers are clumsy and screens differ in size. A piece may jump to a spot that is already taken, or refuse to snap on small screens and snap too eagerly on large ones. This entry settles who wins, when to give up, and how forgiving to be.
Players quit at a point where the next upgrade takes far too long
Everything feels smooth, then one purchase asks for hours of waiting and the players are gone. You can find such walls before release by playing the economy on paper. This entry lists the waits step by step and marks the jumps, leftover coins included.
The game starts running again while a call or a sheet is still on screen
An ad finishes and the game resumes, although a call is still ringing. Or the clock keeps counting the time the player was away. A single on-off switch for pausing cannot cope with two reasons at once. This entry tracks each reason and the pause time.
After switching apps, my game jumps ahead or the pieces fall all at once
A player leaves for a minute and comes back to a game that has played itself forward, with timers expired and blocks piled up. The game was counting real elapsed time with no limit. This entry shows a steady update loop that forgives long gaps in a controlled way.
My game looks blurry on one phone and is cut off or stretched on another
Phones come in many shapes and sharpness levels. A game drawn for one fixed size is then fuzzy, squashed or missing its edges. This entry fits the game picture into any screen with bars where needed, and sizes the drawing surface so it stays sharp.
My idle game's numbers stop growing, show NaN or turn into Infinity after a while
After a few days of play the score freezes, adding one makes no difference, or the screen shows a strange word instead of a number. Ordinary numbers have limits that idle games walk straight into. This entry shows a way to hold huge values, add them, and print them neatly.
Letter-guess colors are wrong when a word has the same letter twice
Your word game marks a letter as present although the secret word has no more of it, and players call it a lie. Two passes over the guess fix it, and the order of those passes is the part that most AI drafts get backwards.
My lives refill timer restarts, stalls at full lives or can be cheated
A player waits almost the whole time for the next life, opens the app, and the clock starts again from zero. Or they sit at full lives, lose one and get it back instantly. Three small details in the timer cause all of this, and the clock tricks as well.
My match-three board starts with matches already on it or no move to make
A fresh board that pops by itself, or one where nothing can be moved, ruins the first seconds of a level. Your AI usually checks only one of the two. This entry gives a start check for both, including the moves that only work in a direction people forget.
My game slows down and then closes after playing many levels in a row
Each level seems fine alone, but after a long session the phone gets hot and the game vanishes. Memory is not given back somewhere. This entry tells a real leak from the normal first jump, and estimates how many levels are left before the end.
My picture-grid puzzle rejects correct answers that differ from my drawing
A player fills the grid so that every number hint is satisfied, yet the game says wrong because the picture is not the one you stored. This entry explains what to compare instead, how to write the hints, and how an empty line is written.