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[oodavid]

Oh yeah, I've seen that happen to others as well. :/

Do any names spring to mind? I wouldn't mind opening a dialogue with them / picking their brains...

[IMP1]

My household is two of those seventy-nine!

I'm also under the impression you did some dealings with a Sophie Meekings, the brother of whom I know. So it's a small world.


I find it a bit weird when the needle lengthens, and I think it'd look less unnatural if he just lifted his arm up. Or does this obscure more of the board?

[oodavid]

Daniel Meekings perchance? We had him stay over not long ago, he came to sunny Newcastle for the football and to teach me how to drink whisky. Top chap.

Yeah, the reason I've limited the range of the shoulder joint is that it starts to look really bad when it's beyond the motions you might make when wearing a suit jacket. And indeed yes, I've been wearing my jacket and gesticulating for days now, lord knows what the lodgers think.



Ignoring the weird stuff with his elbow / needle and focusing on the shoulder (this is the best gif I have to show), it starts to look really weird when elevated too far. I think if the character didn't look "realistic" (ie, was made of putty or rubber or was more of a "toon") then it might look OK, as it stands I think LMB has arthritis or gout or something.

Honestly, just stare at that shoulder... jeez...

Also, cheers for playing! I'm happy to take your feedback, even if it's a torrent of abuse (but really)

EDIT - sometimes he has to point right to the corners too.

[ryansumo]

Just downloaded the game!  Will have some feedback soon.  OR NOT.

Very interesting how the game has evolved since launch.  You're definitely putting a lot of thought and effort into it.

A question regarding China with the caveat that I haven't played the game or read through the entire devlog: Do you do video ads?  Because from my own experience with the one app I released rewarding players with currency for watching video ads can be very lucrative.  Our game never made much money because of a lack of downloads, but our video ad revenue from companies like Vungle often matched our iAP revenue.  I don't know if that scales upwards, but I imagine it would.   

[oodavid]

Ahh, 3 days post-deadline and I'm now going down a rabbit hole to find a memory leak!

This is the memory consumption over time:

• 37Mb - First Load
• 37Mb - View all of Map
• 43Mb - Map After Level 1
• 47Mb - Map After Level 2
• 51Mb - Map After Level 3
• 58Mb - Map After Level 4
• 60Mb - Map After Level 5
• 58Mb - Map After Level 6
• 59Mb - Map After Level 7
• 60Mb - Map After Level 8
• 62Mb - Map After Level 9
• 62Mb - Map After Level 10
• 65Mb - Map After Level 11
• 67Mb - Map After Level 12
• 68Mb - Map After Level 13
• 68Mb - Map After Level 14
• 71Mb - Map After Level 15

Which is frankly, appalling! The memory usage shouldn't double just playing through the first chapter... So it's time for a code review

Just downloaded the game!  Will have some feedback soon.  OR NOT.

Very interesting how the game has evolved since launch.  You're definitely putting a lot of thought and effort into it.

A question regarding China with the caveat that I haven't played the game or read through the entire devlog: Do you do video ads?  Because from my own experience with the one app I released rewarding players with currency for watching video ads can be very lucrative.  Our game never made much money because of a lack of downloads, but our video ad revenue from companies like Vungle often matched our iAP revenue.  I don't know if that scales upwards, but I imagine it would.   

That is really interesting about the video ads, I guess these big ad networks have already solved the China issue (or I at least have the choice to find one that has), thus making the issue someone else's... Maybe there's an argument that countries like China, or with low iAPs get a version of the game with Video ads. Either way, thank you ever so much for the insight!

[oodavid]

Memory leak turned out to be related to TextViews, whenever a new text string is rendered it is cached for future use, which makes sense in some situations, but for me this little score meter that spins up:



led to an ALMIGHTY buffer of rendered text that never got released from memory. It's not *quite* an upstream bug as TextViews aren't supposed to be used like this, but just not documented enough that I would know!

Such a little thing, so much memory.

*aaaaalmost ready to submit for review... just one more playthrough...

[oodavid]

So the latest build, with new chapter, new artwork, new narrator (Lord MountButton) has just been submitted for review by Apple. We've decided to save on confusion by waiting till Apple gives the game the thumbs-up before releasing the same build on Android; that way we can simply say "it's out" rather than deal with the faff-on about which type of phone people have.

For each release we have a video meeting dubbed "two beers" where we each bring a couple of beers and discuss: the last release; what we've managed to get done, what was missed, if we've hit the targets and finally, what we plan for the next release. This is a SUPER quick roundup of that meeting:

What we achieved

• Firstly, we're all super chuffed with how Lord MountButton (LMB) came out
• Me: it took me a lot longer to get this looking as natural as possible, so a few things got pushed off the bottom of my list
• Me: I also added a few extra items to the release, like using LMB on the interstitial loading screen, which essentially meant rewriting the all the logic behind the stackview so that he could be shared across screens
• Gavin: The entire map was redesigned as well as a new chapter, postcards to go with the chapters all using LMB as a common element
• Gavin: Overall very happy with the new theme and direction, because we have a list of themes on the mega spreadsheet to pick from, the whole process feels a lot more coherent and natural
• Simon: new SFX for: threading, yarn "pop", intro/outro whooshes etc. again, because of the theme tightening up he's got a very good holistic understanding of the game.

What we failed to achieve

Most, no, all of the failures belonged to me, but I'm OK with that. Basically LMB was at the tippy-top of the list and seeing Gav's preliminary artwork I wanted to give it the attention it deserved, I think it was the right decision. The things that got bumped off the list are:

• Local Notifications - Say "You have full lives" once the lives have refilled
• Pressure Purchases - When failing a level, "you want to buy some more time / patterns?"
• New Interface for Life Consumption - It's not obvious that lives are consumed when failing a level

Essentially they're all focussed on the "life-cycle" (pun intended); it makes sense to do them all in one go, hence the collective bump off the list.

Targets review

I'm positive there are some great things to deduce from our targets, but truth-be-told I'm not (yet) good enough at interpreting the data. Nonetheless:

Installs
Goal	2,000 (was 1,000)
Android	747
iOS	699
---	-554 (we also have ~16,000 Chinese players, more on that below*)
App Reviews
Goal	100
Android	49
iOS	2
---	-49
Facebook Likes
Goal	100
Actual	131
---	+31
3rd Party Articles
Goal	5 (was 10)
Actual	2
---	-3
Revenue
Goal	£50 (was 0)
Actual	£32
---	-£18

As you can see, we moved the goalposts a little; for example we didn't expect any revenue in this first month, we DESTROYED the initial goal of 1,000 users by getting 18,000 (since a huge chunk of these are Chinese and we're unsure how to monetise that market and have omitted them from our targets, @ryansumo reckons video ads...).

App Reviews and Revenue are strange: Android gets way more reviews but less revenue, iOS is the exact opposite, why don't people review on iOS? Maybe a bug in my prompt code...?

We decided we're OK about the 3rd Party Articles being low, now that we have LMB to front the game, a logo and a tighter theme we can be more confident with our approach from here on out.

Next release

My Goals:

• Simplify the logic behind getting a star-rating - it's currently a bit mysterious
• New in-game element; breakable blocks - they get destroyed when an adjacent button is removed
• Chapter 5 levels designed - "drop the yarn" - I also need to refactor all existing levels to account for the new star-rating logic
• Ponder Video Ads to monetize China...

Gavin's goals:

• Design Chapter 5 - We're going to the "Lost City", map and postcard
• Review the color scheme - we've deviated from the old a bit
• Ongoing promo GFX - headers, composed GFX etc.

Simon's goals:

• Run the Twitter and Facebook accounts
• Unify the SFX throughout - in the same way that the colors have deviated, as has the audio, we currently have part "molecular", part "haberdashery"
• Create a mosical motif for the game

...and with that I'm off to code some new star-rating logic!

[oodavid]

The new star-rating logic and interface is up and ready, just have to go through all 100+ levels now and re-balance!

Already feeling a lot more logical as to how to get a 3-star rating.

Below I use a pattern and fail to achieve the goal, thus a star is lost.

[JobLeonard]

You really love those particles, don't you?

^{I love them as well}

[oodavid]

Haha, yeah I do! Truth-be-told, they're highly optimised so I'm happy to just bandy them about when adding new features!

I've just rebalanced the first 25 levels, a lot easier than using the opaque scoring logic of yesteryear

EDIT - 50 levels done!

[oodavid]

Bit of a late one tonight, but worth it! The current level set (108 levels) have been rebalanced for the new scoring logic.

Next up, implementing a new board mechanic "breakable blocks" to be used in the new chapter!

[oodavid]

Break all the things!

On the left, I break blocks, on the right I break a booster.... hmm...



JobLeonard: and yes, moar particles

[Jad]

Haven't checked in in a bit, but

Whaaaaat!? You changed the hard-to-grasp atom bond system into a human-friendly 'thread buttons through the button holes' theme??

YOU BLEEDING GENIUS

all my respect.

[oodavid]

Haven't checked in in a bit, but

Whaaaaat!? You changed the hard-to-grasp atom bond system into a human-friendly 'thread buttons through the button holes' theme??

YOU BLEEDING GENIUS

all my respect.

That's one way to put a smile on my face!

Yeah, the chemistry theme was just another hurdle for people to jump through before we could get to game!

[oodavid]

Aww year, new puzzle techniques!

[JobLeonard]

Yeah, the chemistry theme was just another hurdle for people to jump through before we could get to game!

I blame budget cuts to education.

[oodavid]

HAPPY DAY!

Latest release got accepted on iTunes! So without further ado, the latest Button Up! is ready to play

This time, we have Lord Mountbutton galavanting onto your small screen

Latest Release: 13th March 2015

EDIT: Google Play is busy propagating, which means it might not hit your country for an hour or two

[JobLeonard]

refreshrefreshrefresh

[Kurtis Beaulac]

Great work! But what about a @2x resolution? Because iOS version looks not good



In additional, need to review iOS app icon. Some buttons is out of corner borders.

[oodavid]

Just added in the relevant codez to do Perfect Pattern levels with blocks! This essentially means the levels get bigger and harder as you play



@romanchiller - yeah, we discovered this only post-release, there's a halfsizing system on GameClosure that kicks in once the game uses a certain amount of memory, so I'm chatting to them at the minute to figure out how to best approach the problem. The next build is being submitted on Wedensday, which isn't enough time to get a fix in place, so it'll be the release after that (end of April).

Have you enjoyed playing?