Just a quick one, but this post is mainly to cover that Pocket Dogfights v1.0.1 is being wrapped up, and I’m going through the process of getting it out there as I write this.

The main goal for this release was to just tidy up some of the little things which people raised having played the initial release, which really goes to show why it’s great to get things out there sooner rather than later.

There’s a number of small fixes, tweaks, and improvements - and it’ll be glad to have them out there :)

Improvements

• Reworked the controls - as you drag/swipe, you’ll automatically fire your standard rounds. When you’ve collected the weapon Power Up, you fire that by tapping. This allows you to decide when you wish to use the ammo.
• Instead of solely communicating the amount of damage by the smoke trail, each plane (including the player’s) will slowly change colour to a shade of red. The deeper the shade, the more severe the damage.
• Instead of disappearing, a collected Power Up will now grow in size before fading out - helping to communicate which Power Up the player has collected.

Tweaks

• Power Ups are now kept on screen for a slightly longer period of time than before. In addition, rather than simply disappear, they now fade out when they expire, and there is a slightly higher chance of spawning them.
• The Credits & Instructions pages now include a counter showing the current page number & the total number of pages.
• With the damage tint in place for the player, the highlight which appears when damage is critical is no longer required. I’ve kept the audio cue, but the new colour shift is much more communicative.

Bugs

• When backgrounding the game, all active touches are cleared - this helps prevent any issues with the input touch being stuck after a forced interruption.
• When pressing the Pause button, the player will no longer fire a burst.
• Enemy Planes are now less aggressive when turning - which should help the difficulty in the boss battles a little more.
• Changed how Power Ups are selected - instead of picking one of the three, the previously selected one is kept and used to filter that one out.

Right now, I’m completing final testing for the Android build - and I’ll be submitting to Google Play once that’s ready. For iOS, it’s going to be a extra couple of days, which is down to some extra testing to be done around Game Center - as with this release, I’m preparing it to share scores with the Mac App Store release, which I plan to submit alongside the iOS one. As these roll out, I’ll keep everyone updated via the Twitter & Facebook pages.

As again, if you’re enjoying Pocket Dogfights, you should take the time to leave us a review on the App Store or Google Play, and also tell your friends - the more sales there are, the possiblility that I can put some time aside to focus on content without having to be distracted by a Day Job (or a search for Contract work ;p).

With the 26th Ludum Dare coming up, I took a brief interlude from working on Pocket Dogfights to work on a small game for the warmup weekend.

The result of most of a Sunday afternoon was Space Arena - my own little take on an arena shooter without the twin stick controls. Although it’s less polished than I had planned (no audio, no real animations for feedback), I’m still reasonably proud of the results. At least since it’s the first fresh project I have worked on since I started the original Pocket Dogfights prototypes back in 2011.

I’m tempted to revisit this at some stage, at least depending on how I go for time - so I’m certainly interested in feedback from anyone who has checked it out.

As I’m writing this, Pocket Dogfights has been live for iOS and Android for two weeks (more or less).

It’s certainly been a heck of a ride. I think a thanks is a bit of an understatement to everyone who helped spread the word, bought it, enjoyed it, and generally been supportive over the last year or so of development.

I think this is the third attempt at making some form of blog. Both of the previous attempts being limited by the software I had chosen at the time. Which, ultimately was a consequence of how I thought I wanted to blog at the time.