Greetings everyone!
The last month or so has been the most productive time as the team got back together over the holidays and hunkered down to finish many things on Techno Dash. Here are the details!
Testing & Tutorial
We finished up creating the game's tutorial with all the features put in and got it playtested for feedback. Our primary place for testing ended up being the weekly Feedback Friday threads on Reddit's Gamedev subsection, however we also created a thread on TIGSource's Playtesting forums (here) which continues to be active and get excellent feedback.
Another factor that got added into the game is voice acting! We originally had a text-to-speech voice however it felt flat, uninteresting and got quickly drowned out in the music. But with the current recorded voice it sounds much more clear.
Meeting Our Deadline
At the beginning of our December "sprint" we received an email from Apple informing us that in order to keep the name Techno Dash reserved we needed to submit a build to them in January. This actually gave us a positive motivation to really put forward the effort to get something completed. In the end we met out deadline (to the minute!) and had our build uploaded and in time we'll hear back on their approval status and any changes needed.
In fact, looking back at it now, that "deadline" has drastically sped up our iterative gamedev process in which we had over two playtest and revisions in the Tutorial part of our game. We aim to set more deadlines for ourselves.
What now?
Even though the title is uploaded and pending for approval in the App store, we're still not finished with it. We are considering our game to finally be in beta builds and will continue to polish features and fix any bugs that pop up. Currently our focus at the moment is working on the UI. The layouts all appear to work however our latest feedback is suggesting that a number of the textures needs updating.
College winter quarter has started and Justin is now back up north for his last term. While he will resume a semi-limited role again, things are quickly approaching release. Stay tuned for our next post which we'll have more screenshots and our final release plan.
