Yesterday evening I panicked. I had accidentally initiated the app publication process on Google Play without the app being finished yet, so I scrambled to test all the remaining levels as fast as I could (and my head hurt). I must say, beating the last few boards had me go "aw yeah" complete with fist-pumping. It must have looked sort of dumb seeing as I was in bed at the time... And then I uploaded an OK app.
Morning came, and I had apparently misunderstood Google twice. What I thought I did was publish a beta version of the app. Then, I thought I had made a mistake, but apparently, publishing a beta version was exactly what I had done! So, no half-finished app publicly available on the market, luckily.
Oh well! Everyone's a newbie at some point, right?
Today is a weird day. The game is so close to finished that I can't really believe it. What's left is a bunch of possible bugs I'd like to iron out. Nothing serious - I've noticed that, for example, some boards retain a saved state even after they've just been beaten, but not always. Other than that, the game behaves fairly well. There's some slowdown that I don't think is the fault of the game but rather my phone, and I've added an automatic frame-skip feature to help combat most of it.
The game is designed for 60 frames per second. I wanted the animations to really feel fluid, since the entire concept of the game is about sliding things. You can see this in much of the interface. Transitions all slide up and down, left and right, and some buttons and the game board slide into view. This of course looks really good (if I may say so myself) but the main point of this is that I'm using it to steer the player's attention. A complex screen is presented quickly, but in steps. When you choose game board, I have all the boards animate in one-by-one so you'll easier understand which one is "first" and which one is "last" without spelling it out. When you play, the actual game board slides in last, after you've seen the miniature version of the solution and the medal you're striving to collect.
Also, there's one major feature left - the single in-app-purchase to unlock all the locked game boards. As you might imagine, this is really rather important. It's what'll, hopefully, help me turn this into a living one day. This is why I had to "publish" the app, so I could test that functionality out.
With that said, I'm off to code! See you on the other side!
