Finishing up Snavi
This week was the final push to our debut iOS release of Snavi! Mary finished the beta testing and bug finding, Billy fixed up some last-minute issues and glitches, and Snavi is almost wrapped up and ready to ship!
We are so excited for this release! This is our first mobile release and we are ready to give it out to the world. The release will be a free release, no ads or monetization. We decided long ago that our first game would be completely free. We really want to give back to the community and get feedback from the community.
That being said, last minute release issues were not just game-related. We had to get everything up on the Apple App store which took longer than expected. For the most part it was smooth. Upload the app descriptions, titles, names, etc.
Then came uploading the dreaded app preview images.
Apple apparently requires you to upload the images for all of Apple's different iPhones/iPads and various screen sizes. I think the intention is that you take the image screenshots natively with each type of Apple phone (iPhone X, iPhone 12, etc) and the dimensions and preview images will be perfect. Buuuut... we are a small studio and I'm not a big enough Apple fan-boy to own all their phones and iPads, so I wasn't able to provide perfect matches for every platform.
So many image preview sizes =_=
But I winged it! Fortunately, apple will allow you to automatically scale some of the variations. You can upload just one version (say a 6.5" version of the images) and Apple will automatically scale/use those with lower but compatible platform resolutions. But the problem is .. I don't have a 6.5" phone, so my images wouldn't be scaled to some of the larger models. I did have a iPhone X, so I had to manually scale/resize my images to meet the 6.5" requirements (and other variants). Apple requires the input image resolution to be pixel-perfect match with the phones' resolution.
To scale these images, I used my trusty Gimp and applied some image scaling to the iPhone X images. Then I pulled out my trusty iPad mini (from 2014), and did the same procedure for iPad previews.
All-in-all, it took a good day to get the iOS app store information filled out. Next up we will do the Google Play store. From what I hear, that's an even more involved process. Yay.
Feedback Friday
We participated in #FeedbackFriday on Twitter! We put out a tweet asking the community for games they would like us to review/test over the weekend to provide feedback.
We were super excited to be participating in this and hopefully will expose us to more games!
Game Dev Masters
First up was an upcoming 2021 pre-release game by @hulgarth called Game Dev Masters. The game looks to re-imagine the Game Dev Tycoon type game with fresh 3D graphics / effects and some new twists on game play.
When Mary and myself opened this up, I immediately felt connected to the background music and style. The game was light-hearted and inviting, and when combined with the character select screen, provided a quirky and enjoyable experience. Something about the avatar dancing away to this background music really worked!
Go check out the game on Itch.io at https://hulgarth.itch.io/gdm.
The developer told me that they are planning to release this for Early Access on Steam by June of 2021, but until then you can test out early pre-Alpha updates on their Itch page (linked above).
Below is an image of our in-game developer working hard on her upcoming erotic / idle game (rated E for Everyone). :-D
Gypsum and The Travelers
Here is another cool game tweeted to us by @made_bear. They are making a new NES game (yes, that NES). The colors really create an atmosphere of being lost in a dark forest, and it looks great with the NES color palette. We're looking forward to playing it!
Other cool things
Here are some random links I came across this week.
Using 3D animation/rigging for 2D sprites.
I spent a bit of time doing some technical research on the graphics in our next game Arthur. The game will be a pixelated aesthetic, but will be modeled in 3D. While going through the Reddit forums, I found an interesting link.
Someone is building a tool to do 2D sprite animations using 3D rigging / animations in Unity. This looks really cool and we'll definitely be looking into something similar for Arthur.
Toon Shading Tutorial in Unity
We found this really well-written toon/cell shading tutorial for Unity. I actually went ahead and followed it and implemented my own toon shader in my test Unity application.
You can follow the author on Twitter @roystanhonks
That's all for this week! We are wishing you and your families a Happy Thanksgiving!