So the last couple of weeks have had their ups and downs, including a short metal health break for me and Danielle who seriously needed it. But now we've hit a very important milestone in the design process. Ball on a Stick is now officially in it's beta testing phase.
But before getting to this point, we've made some very important decisions regarding features.
First, we've upgraded to Unity 5. Originally this was to implement In App Purchases, because Unity's system was supposed to make this super easy. But other new Unity 5 features have made our lives infinitely easier for adding new features and fixing old ones.
Second, as hinted at, we've dropped In App Purchases. Once again Google rears it's ugly head on this one.
One of the biggest things this project has taught me is a new hatred for Google's convuluted systems. You need to make like 8 seperate accounts to do ANYTHING on any Google website, and it just becomes so ridiculous. We just got tired of it and decided to drop the feature instead.
This may hurt our bottom line, but we want to keep this project simple.
Another big focus before Beta was graphics. As previously noted, we implemented the randomly generated flower system. After that, we got focused on giving every ball in the game a special animation when the player sets a new record. This took a while, and required a lot of sound gathering.
This required the gathering of some public domain sounds off the internet. I take pride in the fact that I gathered as many of the sounds as I could myself, and wanted to do all of them myself. Unfortunately, since I don't have a sound studio, I can only do so much.
But regardless, I think everything came out well, and now we are officially testing the game once again.
During this process, we've already made some adjustments and improvements to the game.
We've had some reports that the game is difficult for beginners, and a few people have suggested the idea of being able to resize the ball to make the game easier. I thought about this for a while, and we came up with a solution to this.
The ball's size is now linked to a slider in the options menu that allows you to change the size of the ball if you are finding the game too difficult.
The trade off for this is that the smaller you make the ball, the less rewards you recieve.
Our plan now is to continue testing with these new improvements to see if we can make the game more user friendly. Last time we tested our focus was core gameplay mechanics. This time, we're focusing on the playability and balance of the game. We want to release ASAP, but we also want the game to be good.
So as always, stay tuned here for further updates as we get close to the game's release.