So the beta ran over the weekend and I received some hints and input from good friends. I am happy that most of the people I talked to that tried the game, seemed to like it till now.
I decided that while in beta, I want to push a version on Fridays and Tuesdays, and the same goes for the blog posts. That way, I can celebrate a release and look back on what went good, and what went bad.
The good
The patch note list is quite long, and I think the version smoothes alot of smaller problems, that get in the way:
– delete button now also makes stations transparent
– committing a level now directly opens the level instead of going back to menu
– added a sfx off button in the options
– sfx now happen less often depending on the type of sound
– added new portrait for robot and boss
– reworked solution screen
– redesigned most levels in chapter four and raised their complexity
– added initial persistance of player progress
Due to the Event system, and me starting to use it very early in the development, some features were literally to liners:
To make the buildings transparent, they just need to listen to another event, and thats it.
The big one is the solution screen update:
I am not sure if the table is a little info overload, but I will test it out. An idea for monetization would be having high scores only for payed users, and showing links to the shop when the full version is not yet bought.
The Bad
The big feature is the player progress. Now the solved levels are stored in a file, which unfortunately requires additional android api accesses namely the famous “App wants to have access to your saved files”, which is really a shame, because all I really want to do is store your progress.
The Ugly
I notice, that I need to take time to automate some tasks: I would like to make the Android / Itch.io packages automatically, and push them online. Currently thats manual work. Especially with the apk version it gets annoying: I need to increase the version number manually in the config, also, when switching to a dev build, unity still wants to sign the app, so I need to provide the keys for that for any Android build, that I do. Outsourcing that to a script should be the go to move here.
Also, I need to increase automated testing again. I am a fan of unit tests, but till now could not get a hang of how to implement this in the component world, even though that should be fairly easy. I need to force myself to do that more.
