Today is kind of the final day since I’ll be out of town tomorrow.
I’m on a “feature freeze” mode now – it’s too risky to add new features so let’s just make sure everything looks fine and is polished. First thing I did was testing the game on iPhone and that was a good idea because I had to quite a bit of special cases to prevent experience damaging issues with gestures on freaking iOS Safari. I had to change the emojis for exported icons, which gave me more control over the experience.
I also did a lot of small assorted changes to improve the mobile experience in general, and fixed some bugs with the default values for the settings.
Surprisingly, we managed to get two important last minute additions to the game: The first one was dinti’s first version of the menu music track, a jumpy, happy melody to get you into the mood of having a great time with Miku by the lake.
Second, I managed to get another artist on board, Valentina with whom I’m also working in a secret-for-now project, was able to put together the long needed logo for the game; I hadn’t wanted to ask her about this to prevent putting her into multiple projects and being very “intense”, but I’m glad she did it.
On more art news, alcaraz managed to finish the car model, and to do some tweaks in Miku’s idle animation and in the environment, he also mentioned he’d have liked to have worked more of the environment, but time wasn’t enough.
Still, it’s outstanding work.
Not only he did this, but we also choose that, for the title screen, we’d use a prerendered image, higher quality than in the game so not just an screenshot; after some back and forth (because the image should also work for mobile so there’s some layout considerations), we had this amazing piece, a worthy home for the logo as well.
Did some checks before sending the submission, making clear we weren’t breaching any license or terms of the contest; I decided to remove the cloud textures we had got from somewhere… they mentioned they could be used freely as long as you applied them to something but didn’t package them in your app, which is just what we were doing. So I had to manually regenerate these textures with some noise algorithms and GIMP magic.
Submission took a loooong time. I decided to use the Japanese submission form to hopefully reach more jurors more easily (I hope that was the right call and it doesn’t backfire at me due to some improper translation). As part of this I created the detailed readme files for the project in Japanese, and recorded the demonstration gameplay video as an unlisted YoutTbe link.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 