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[Mothil]

hmm, maybe there's something I could do to fix performance. I'm glad you like it. 

[JobLeonard]

Weirdly enough, after the advertising played the audio stopped and it ran smoother.

[Mothil]

What audio stopped? At the game over screen?

[JobLeonard]

In-game, it happened after an ad played. Could just be my nexus being very old and buggy though

[Mothil]

I'd love to find out if that's some performance issue in the game, as I haven't had the problem myself. Granted my phone is very new, so it runs smoothly everywhere. I got an old android laying around somewhere, so I'll try to find that.

[GarBenjamin]

Congrats Mothil! Your long journey is (nearly) completed. Awesome stuff!

I missed the bit about it being out on GameJolt until just now. I will check it out this afternoon. Looking forward to seeing how it has evolved over the past 9 months or so.

[Mothil]

Hey, and thank you GarBenjamin.
I'm trying to upload it to app store now. What an incredibly painful process. I won't give up though!

[GarBenjamin]

It's much more polished. A lot of animation going on. The game itself actually feels much better than the title screen would suggest.

Any chance of adding a Difficulty settings? On Easy mode make the colliders on the shrimp twice the current size (probably twice the size of the shrimp), Normal mode make colliders 50% larger than they are now and Hard mode the colliders the same size as they are now. You could also make it so Easy mode is 1 point per shrimp collected, Normal is 2 and Hard mode is 3 points.

As it is I like it but the difficulty is at the point where I don't play long enough to get much enjoyment from it. And it is mainly due to the tiny size of the shrimp (or at least the colliders on the shrimp).

The above was based on playing the web version at GameJolt.

[Mothil]

That's a great idea about the colliders. I'll look into it real soon. :D
Thank you for the feedback! 

[GarBenjamin]

Glad it was helpful.

If you update the GameJolt release with larger shrimp colliders let me know! You've put so much work into this game I'd like to be able to survive long enough to experience more of it. Previously I often crashed into an enemy while trying to grab a shrimp. So I am thinking if I can collect them just tiny bit sooner it will make a nice difference.

[Mothil]

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah! I got into iTunes Store! Feel free to check it out if you have an iPhone. 

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.MothilGames.Akiro

iTunes Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/no/app/akiro/id1135384074?mt=8

Depending on user feedback, I might end up making the start a bit easier. I've increased the shrimp hitbox, but I haven't launched that update yet. I'm also working on implementing facebook sharing, as well as friend leaderboards. I might also try to sneak into the Microsoft Store, let's just see! 

[JobLeonard]

Downloaded + positive little 5 star review to give you some more views in the store

But yeah, the difficulty curve could use some tweaking

[Mothil]

Thank you so much!
I'll start working on the difficulty today, seems like most people find it troublesome.

[JobLeonard]

I think it's almost at the "just right" level, especially once you get into it. It just needs a bit of easing into. I mean, I have yet to ragequit.

[Mothil]

I've delayed the puffer spawning quite a bit in the beginning now, and there's fewer jellyfish pre-5 points. It's quite hard to balance this, cause it is quite a casual game, but I've always imagined it to have a difficulty level sort of like Flappy Bird. I'm not going to give up though, I'll balance it until it feels just right.

[Mothil]

It's time for the scary part: Marketing. This is a whole new experience for me, but I'll just start the same way I do with most other things: dive head first.

I also managed to update the google play build with a build that crashed at startup Monday night. I couldn't for the life of me find out what was wrong, so I had to go to bed (extremely tired) with a build on Google Play that crashed. Needless to say, I had nightmares about bad reviews and 1-stars all night long. "Thankfully" I haven't been active on the marketing, so I don't think anyone noticed it. :p

I've had 26.000~ impressions on iTunes Store, and 'only' 23 downloads. There's also 305 page views.

305 out of 21,176 unique devices have clicked on the Akiro page. That's 1.5%...
23 downloads out of 305 page views, that's 7.5%...

Of course there are various factors, like robot scans (as someone told me) and friends downloading. This scares the crap out of me. I know I've tried to make a game that doesn't follow the typical naming convention in app store, and pixel art isn't the most popular thing there, but that's a scary low percentage.

One thing's for sure, I need to create a better logo, and I might have to change the title to something more exciting.

[JobLeonard]

Akiro is a cute squid, and you already have some nice pixel art of him (her? it?) for the game over screens.

I think emphasizing the cute main character would be good. A splash-image of Akiro being attacked by every other creature in the game would be nice too, since it represents the gameplay quite nicely and looks like those splash screens in old games.

[Mothil]

Indeed. Right now I have the pufferfish as an icon (mainly because it was the most effective / quickest way to get a decent logo).
I'm going to experiment a ton with logos in the coming future, so I'll keep a note on what seems to work and what doesn't.

[Mothil]

Why didn't I think of this sooner, I can just throw my icon-tests in the devlog!

I think my favorites are the one in the bottom left, and the bottom right.
If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to share them.




I'm also adding the same image as smaller, cause this is somewhat how they appear on the phone.

[JobLeonard]

I think the first one is the best of this bunch, but I'd replace Akiro with a higher-res drawing of him. It's ok that he doesn't appear in the game like that.