Development Blog #10

iPhone App Game Development Blog #10

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Masterpiece Theater. I'm your host, ralp99, today we will be examining the latest goings on with my iPhone App production. So sit back, pull up a tall plate of nachos and a Long Island Iced Tea, perhaps put some fresh tobacco in your pipe, and chill out for a spell.

Things are going well. We are getting a lot more people testing our new game "180" lately (I believe this is the name we're sticking with - I paid for a website for it, anyway!) The game is coming along well and there's been a lot of really good feedback from a variety of different gamers (other devs, hardcore gamers and casual players and straight-up non-gamers alike). All of that makes me very happy. There's a big issue that everyone has when they play it for the first time, which is they play it kinda the 'wrong' way - this is a huge hurdle that we must delicately handle when we implement a (very simplistic) tutorial system. It is absolutely crucial to nail this aspect of the project at this stage - if someone can't tell how to play your game from the get-go, they will very likely "miss the point" and not give it another chance. You only get one chance at a first impression! We have a "how to play" game card in there, but I think it needs to be a little animated thing - hopefully this will not be too much work to implement (whatever it is, we can handle it!)

The aesthetic is coming along, now that the majority of the gameplay is in place I have been concentrating heavily on the visual development of things. This is also quite crucial, as your game needs to sell itself in the screenshots alone. Puzzle games are (literally) a dime a dozen so we really need to put forth some super-tight assets (character and background artwork) to really sell the thing. I am not very concerned about it, just being a little careful with things to make sure it comes out top-notch (if it takes a few rounds of iteration, so be it!) I lingered on the UI design a bit, but it finally started coming around last week. I will look to my testers to see how it is received after implementation - hopefully we hit it, I think it looks great!

I registered a new website to start some "viral" style promotion for 180, I have a slew of ideas of what to do with it. This is the stage where we want to start name dropping a little and putting the brand out there a bit to let people know we are a-l-i-v-e and up to something. It's an interesting road to go down.

We'll have a HcG meeting tomorrow and maybe get a new build together (it has been awhile!) I can't wait to see how things look with a lot of the new polish in there. Things are definitely getting exciting!