Hello, I’m fedellen and welcome to my 8th devlog. I ended up skipping last week’s devlog during our little family vacation to Sacremento and no actual development was done during our stay of 6 days. Our 2 year old son ended up being great on the planes but quite a terror in the dark car rides through Minnesota.
Just a small family gathering focused around visiting abonbon’s grandpa and our son sharing christmas morning with his (now) favorite cousin. The super unfortunate part is that I fell ill at the very end and am currently still doing pretty poorly. There was some development time on either end of the trip however. In my last blog post I outlined our main two current goals as sound polish and implementing achievements into the game.
Before the Break
On the days leading up to our christmas vacation we went a bit into overdrive and slammed 72 achievements into Sonar Smash. This included coming up with names and descriptions for each one individually, visualizing the achievement screen, two new pixel art assets from abonbon, and lots and lots of coding. They were partially functioning and giving out rewards just prior to our trip so we got to playtest it a bit here and there during. We still have some work to do to make it less clunky and possibly reduce the amount of achievements available.
Amidst the achievement chaos we did get some positive feedback from a Community Beta participant and countless polish tweaks have been applied across the game. The game play is feeling really smooth but every time I see something to polish I jump at the chance. It really makes a difference and knowing that every player from here on out will only see the hyper polished state is very comforting. As for the positive feedback, it was pretty simple yet heart warming to hear:
Next Time
As I’m still battling this illness we do intend to do a few things here and there development wise. My goal will be to jump into my headphones and do some sound polishing as there are some lingering issues and a some sounds still missing from action. abonbon has been relearning some video editing software and doing some trailer mock ups with better pacing and text flashes. We intend to have a much nicer trailer for launch than our Early Reveal Trailer. Beyond that there are some achievements I have yet to code into the game play and I hope to begin linking our Google Play Services successfully for Google Play achievements and leader boards; as far as I can tell Game Center is pretty much ready to go.
Thanks for reading!
fedellen, Pixel Pajama Studios
o/
fedellen, Pixel Pajama Studios
o/