Yes it’s true! As of around 1AM last night we finished OpenFeint achievement integration and are officially done with UPSAT! You have no idea how great it felt to check those last few items off the list and move them down to the “Completed” section. It’s been a long exhausting 4 months filled with sleepless nights and many many changes, but it’s all paid off and we’re ready to begin testing!
In case you don’t remember here’s a screenshot of what our game started out as:
EWWWWWW
It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come! Now the game itself was just placeholder art, but we were REALLY thinking of going with that UI for a while… we must have been out of our minds. Needless to say the game looks and plays alot better now and we’ve gone through a lot to get here. We kept a running checklist of tasks as we went and it actually turned into a nice catalogue of achievements, so I thought I’d share it with you. Blue = Ryan Red = Me:
Click to expand
I’ve learned so much during this process (ESPECIALLY since I didn’t even know Java before starting this whole thing) and we’re both just raring to take what we’ve learned and get started on our next game. But for now, we’ve still got a little bit more work to do before this bad boy makes it into the marketplace. Later on today we’ll be spamming our friends and family to find out who loves us the most would like to support us by participating in testing. We need to find out who has what phones, what Android versions, etc etc so that we can make sure we get a good cross-section of users. This is extremely important in helping us iron out any bugs before launch day. As an example, we’ve already discovered (and FIXED) a bug that occured on Android 3.0 and above that crashed the game on startup. As you can imagine, something like that in a games infancy in the marketplace could totally destroy the games chances of becoming popular as any users you do get will immediately uninstall and leave negative feedback. Then, even after we fix the bug, no one is likely to download it from then on because they’d think it wasn’t any good. We want to create an image that shows we’re reputable developers and that you’re not wasting your time when you download one of our games! That being said, testing is important. We’ll probably test for about two weeks then, assuming no major bugs, hit the giant shiny launch button! (Does Not Exist)
During the next two weeks you can expect a good amount of information from us so be on the lookout. We’re also debating on making some changes to the menu to make it look nicer and also add in the OpenFeint GameFeed social notices bar. It’s pretty cool and lets you see what your friends are doing in game and also lets us send you developer notices like, “New Update” or something of the sort. We’d love your feedback if we DO decide to change the menu around, so if you see any pics on facebook or twitter be sure to let us know what you think.
Hyperneon, OUT!