So it's been another week of hard work on Ball on a Stick, and we've had to make some hard decisions in this process.
Most of the work we've done this week has been under the hood. Specifically, banging our heads on the hood as we try to implement Google Play Services. After 3 days, and even bringing in outside help from our good friend Laurence(You may remember him as the programming genius from Rat Boy) We still haven't been able to get it working. So we've decided to drop Google Play Services. We have wasted more hours on it, and suffered through way more frustration than it's worth. The game works fine without it.
That all being said, the majority of the work left for the game is visual. Danielle has been working feverishly on artwork. In particular she has been drawing a lot of flowers. This is because we have added a nice new feature to the game. The scenery around the ball is now procedurally generated, so the flowers around the stick sprout randomly from an array of different flowers. It seems trival, but we think it really brightens up the frame and that random factor makes the frame always feel fresh.
Each time the scene changes.....
...So do the flowers.
Our focus now is adding explosions to all the balls. I think I noted this recently, but the balls now explode when the player sets a new record. Or at least, they are supposed to. We are still making particle effects for each different type of explosion based on the type of ball. That will be our focus as we work today. Finding matching sound effects for these explosions is another challenge, as one obviously can't just blow up their backyard and record it. We are finding work arounds through royalty free sounds and such.
The other big feature we have left is In-app purchases, which may require an engine upgrade. But we'll be handling that last.
After that, we will be beta testing and beginning our proper marketing for the game, then we'll be releasing ASAP. Our hope was to have this game done WAY before now. We are ready to be working on bigger and better things.
We'll update again once we have ourselves a working Launch Candidate and have a release date.