So after a couple of weeks or reletive hardship on the code front, this week has been very productive.
Yesterday, after a bit of minor gear grinding, we finally fully implemented the currency system to the game, and me and Danielle both agree that the game feels much better with it.
And unlike previous updates, this time we have screenshots!
The amount of Gold Orbs you have is displayed at all times during gameplay now.
The amount of gold orbs possessed by the player is now displayed on the gameplay screen, as well as in the options...
You can also see here that we now have a button on the options screen for buying new balls with your Gold Orbs. Clicking this button will unlock a random ball from one of the 40 locked balls in the default game (There will be 50 total balls in the first release of the game). Each unlock will cost 100 Gold Orbs.
A new ball is unlocked!
You can also see a Buy Ball Packs button, that will be where the player can go to unlock paid ball packs. But we don't have in-app purchases working just yet. But as designed now, the player will never need to pay for any balls in the game, all of them will be accessable with Gold Orbs. All of the paid packs will be subsets of the balls in the main game, if the player wants a spesific ball and doesn't want to leave getting that ball to chance.
There are two ways to earn Gold Orbs. The first is through gameplay.
The new Game Over Screen
You will earn Gold Orbs based on the how well you do in the game. The longer the player can keep the ball balanced, the more Gold Orbs you will earn. You will also earn a bonus if you set a new personal record.
The other method of getting Gold Orbs is watching ads. You'll recieve a boost of 20 Orbs each time you watch an ad, and more importantly, you will be helping pay the bills of 2 broke game designers.
We ended up going with Unity Ads over Google Admob, because Google Admob was senselessly complicated to set up in terms of the amount of accounts and other hoops we needed to jump though in order to get it to work, while Unity Ads took less than an hour to set up and works great. It seems ironic to me that Google got rich off of it's very simple website, and yet every other website it has ever put it's hands on has become bloated and needlessly overcomplicated. I mean come on! Why do you need 3 accounts to do practically anything with a Google website, like Youtube or Admob? Ridiculous. But this could be a post for a different time.
You'll also notice the sign in button on the game over screen, that is for Google Play Game Services, which we are still trying to figure out for our Leaderboards, as well as a few other bugs that seem to be happening with Google Play Game Services Integration that seem to once again go back to the problem of Google making things more complicated than they need to be.
We are coming very close to having our Gold Candidate ready for testing, so it won't be too much longer until release!
Check back here for more updates soon