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[schoenepauck]

OK, so I added a timer that shows total playing time after you finish the game, because I thought that there might be people who would play speed runs of Cavernaut. But now I'm wondering – and this might sound a bit stupid –: should I stop the timer when the player pauses the game, or keep the clock running? Is there a common practice among speedrunners? Hmmm...



(Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe no one would bother to try a speed run anyway, but that timer feature was added in maybe 15 minutes, so either way it wouldn't hurt me.)

[schoenepauck]

Spent the better part of today working on the music (again) -- it's not one of my strengths, and what came out is probably still not 100% perfect, but I think I can finally live with it. I put the tracks on Soundcloud, so go ahead, listen, let me know what you think

https://soundcloud.com/schoenepauck/cavern-ambience
This is the main in-game music. I basically built upon the track I used for the gameplay video I made a long time ago, but I still like the ambient feeling of that, so I'll stick with it.

https://soundcloud.com/schoenepauck/waiting-for-launch
The menu music loop. For this one, I first played around with Figure, then took what I had and expanded it in Garage Band.

[schoenepauck]

Whoa, just a little bit of polishing, and I'll be ready to submit it to Apple for review (that is, unless my beta testers find some really bad game-breaking bugs). I'll probably upload the release version next week -- feels good, but I'm getting a bit nervous, too, about releasing my baby into the wild

I'm working on the app store page right now, writing (and rewriting, and rewriting...) the description text, preparing the screenshots, and making a preview video. Put together a 30-second-mix of the in-game music yesterday, and edited some freshly-captured gameplay just now. I uploaded it on vimeo, if you want to have a look:



Now I'll just have to do it _again_ for the iPad preview...

[schoenepauck]

OK, so I cheated and scaled the iPhone video to the iPad size (with black borders) - finalizing the game had priority, so I rather created some more tile graphics, like these plants:



And I have submitted a version to Apple, hope it passes review!   

Now I'm preparing for the launch: Writing a press release, blog posts... I'll probably make it available to the press some days before the actual launch date, although I'm not completely decided yet.

[Zorg]

And I have submitted a version to Apple, hope it passes review!

Why should they reject it?
Any updates?

I have some late questions regarding your texture crash: Do you use different zoom levels in the game? I guess you are using the 1080x1920 iPhone resolution? But you wanted to use a 2048x2048 texture which almost covers two screens entirely?

[schoenepauck]

Why should they reject it?
Any updates?

I have some late questions regarding your texture crash: Do you use different zoom levels in the game? I guess you are using the 1080x1920 iPhone resolution? But you wanted to use a 2048x2048 texture which almost covers two screens entirely?

I'll let you know as soon as I get new info from Apple 

Regarding the textures: No, there are no different zoom levels. The game adapts to different screen resolutions; on the newer iPhones it runs in iPhone 5 resolution (640x1136, the iPhone 6/6+ can deal with that, they scale automatically). The textures are larger because I use them as a parallax scrolling background and don't want the BG to look too repetitive, and as the texture dimensions have to be a power of 2 (e.g. 256, 512, 1024, or 2048), 2048x2048 gave me the best results.

[Zorg]

Thank you for the explanation. I thought the iPhone 5 and 6 had a full HD/1080p/1920x1080 px resolution display, but it seems only the iPhone 6 Plus does. I'm unsure which resolution i should use when starting to develop a game myself. I thought about 1080p and i thought you would target full HD devices, too.

Good luck with the launch, almost there! :D

[schoenepauck]

Just when you think everything's running smoothly... while playtesting yesterday I discovered a huge bug that, while only appearing very rarely, is so totally embarrassing that I felt I had no choice but to pull the binary from review. 

Good news: I fixed it straight away and immediately submitted the new binary for review, but I'm afraid this means the review gets delayed even longer now. 

[schoenepauck]

Hello everybody, exciting news: Cavernaut was finally approved by apple, so it is ready for release at last! After more than 3 years of development time, it will be available on the App Store on September 22!   

To celebrate & promote this, I created an updated trailer:





Android users, please be patient with me, I will try to get the Android version ready as soon as possible. Probably within the next two weeks.

[marcgfx]

the trailer is awesome! I kind of like how different the trailer style is the games style, but I cant help thinking it might look cool to use the assets from the trailer. but it's probably better with the abstracted version, as it could get hard to see all the details on mobile anyway.

the handling reminds me a lot of OIDS a game I loved waaaay back ... I always wanted a modern version of it, but never got round to making one myself.
good luck on the store!

[schoenepauck]

the trailer is awesome! I kind of like how different the trailer style is the games style, but I cant help thinking it might look cool to use the assets from the trailer. but it's probably better with the abstracted version, as it could get hard to see all the details on mobile anyway.

the handling reminds me a lot of OIDS a game I loved waaaay back ... I always wanted a modern version of it, but never got round to making one myself.
good luck on the store!

Thanks marcgfx! I admit that the cinematic trailer creates a visual dissonance, but I wanted to create something different for a change, and I liked the idea of showing a different interpretation of the abstracted in-game art. The game art is indeed very functional, as you say. But I also chose that abstracted style for nostalgic reasons. And of course the creation of assets is a bit less time-consuming; I did everything by myself, so I had to make sure the workload is manageable.

And yeah, I think it's similar to OIDS (i just watched a video of that title), but there is no shooting in Cavernaut, and the ship controls are much more responsive.

[schoenepauck]

Got some great positive feedback already from some people who got early access. Yay! But I am still looking for testers of the Android version. I posted that already on the playtesting forum here, but maybe someone reading this here is interested.? If you happen to own an Android device and would like to give the Cavernaut beta a spin, drop me a line via PM with your email address and the device model & Android version you'd like to test it on, and I'll provide you with the APK.

[schoenepauck]

Today Cavernaut was released for iOS on the App Store! Yay!  

It's finally out there, and it's already receiving a lot of love from people around the world. I'm super excited, super happy now!



Here's the App Store link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/cavernaut/id972481169?mt=8

Many thanks to everybody who supported me, on these forums and elsewhere. Of course there is still some work left to do. After all, I announced an Android version of the game, so I will keep this thread until that is released, too.

[droxon]

Looking forward for the android version. 

[schoenepauck]

Looking forward for the android version.  

Sorry for neglecting this devlog; these are busy times for me. But I can finally announce a release date for the Android version: It will be available on Google Play and Amazon October 13th!

[schoenepauck]

Hi there! Almost 3 years after starting this thread, Cavernaut is now finally available for iOS and Android, too. 

Thanks everybody who has tuned in here during that time, commented on the game, maybe already played it or otherwise supported the development. It was a great experience, and I hope to repeat this in the future – maybe start a new game, maybe add some content to Cavernaut... who knows. For now I'll mark this game as "completed", and here's the download links again:

App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/app/cavernaut/id972481169?mt=8

Google play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.de.einheit_b.cavernaut

Hope you are having fun with it, and let me know what you think – I'm always happy to hear from you!

Cheers,
Jan