#development retrospective

[rainblocks development retrospective] 26 – The end

2014.05.27 – Submitted

2014.06.04 – In Review

That is the end of my notes. Not exciting, except that those days were exciting. It was a hell of a journey, and I am super happy with the results.

More is coming. Another game. Updates to rainblocks. Game development is fun.

[rainblocks development retrospective] 25 – A key framing point

[rainblocks development retrospective] 24 – Doing things right

2014.05.05 – Redid blocks into subclass of SKSpriteNode – Tweaked sliding

The titular rainblocks should have been a subclass of SKSpriteNode from the beginning. This would have cut down an enormous amount of code and made debugging a lot easier. It was one of the greatest lessons from this project

[rainblocks development retrospective] 23 – Almost done

2014.04.30 – Implemented achievements

An issue with the achievements caused a bug where the notifications would happen repeatedly. Thankfully when I submitted a fix with a request to expedite the review, Apple did it. The fix was up the next day. This was a silly little mistake on my end, but there was not much of a change between the code in subaku and rainblocks for handling achievements.

2014.…

[rainblocks development retrospective] 21 – More new things

2014.04.27 – Fixed muddy

Another classic example of how notes need to be descriptive to be useful.

2014.04.28 – Added new assets – Background transition in (but choppy) – Added ability to shake blocks individually

The artwork arrived! I was blown away when I saw it and how alive rainblocksbecame. It was a great moment in realizing that I didn’t need to have artwork all done and good looking…

[rainblocks development retrospective] 20 Big changes

2014.04.25 – Change logic animation before updating board Since the animations are all chained, it was important to determine what to do first and then have it happen. I’m still not sure if this is the right way, but I didn’t want to slow down the game by preventing player input during clearing, or cause confusion by having the player be able to “undo” a match before it goes through.

2014.04.26 –…

[rainblocks development retrospective] 19 – Sliding and the web

2014.03.28 – Added subaku to web view – Added Rotation for web view

There was a gross-looking web view that I had for “How to Play” which just described the game and had a link at the bottom to subaku. It was pretty gross.

2014.04.24 – Added sliding movement

This was a big deal and took a lot of time to tweak to be smooth and usable. You can slide a little bit (anywhere on the screen) and see…

[rainblocks development retrospective] 17 Fixed again?

2014.03.17 – Added level select – Changed time gained per match to half of the speed – Fixed animation bug – Changed rainbow display – Cleaned up rainbow and added text – Sent out beta #6

I had completely forgotten that I was sending out betas this early. The game was pretty much “done” at this point, it was just the fine-tuning stage until the art was ready. Level select was originally a…