Week 4: Level-selection, unlocks, and bug fixes on Inner-Tube Climber!

A animated pixel-art image of a shiny gold medal.
Go you! Here, have a gold medal.


tl;dr: A level-select screen, an accordion widget, support for unlocking levels, and a lot of bug fixes and polish.


Inner-Tube Climber endgame

Where can we see it??

A few folks have been asking me where they can see the latest version of Inner-Tube Climber. Sorry, you can't yet! Unlike pretty much everything else I've made before, I'm not planning on publishing this as a browser app. Instead, it's going to be a mobile app! It would be pretty easy for me to also publish this as a browser app, but I think I'll limit it to just mobile, so that I can funnel more traffic through the app stores. Sorry!

ETA: Probably sometime around February 12

I was really hoping to have this wrapped up by the end of January, but of course some things took longer to implement than expected. Hopefully as I become more familiar with all this game dev stuff, I'll be able to plan my timeframes a little better! (Hah, hah, ha...)

A meme saying "If you could just stop estimating time for things you know nothing about, that'd be great."

At this point, I think I have all of the ins-and-outs of Inner-Tube Climber implemented, except for the levels!

So I'll spend most of this week designing levels. Then I'll take day or two preparing the app for publication and polishing my app-store optimization (ASO). I should have it submitted to both app stores by the end of this week. Then it might take a few days for it to be approved before it'll actually show up in the app stores.

What happened last week?

  • I did a game jam over the weekend with some friends!
    • I'll talk more about that in a separate post.
  • I added a rank system. You can know earn a bronze, silver, and gold rank in each level.
  • I added a system for unlocking levels. You can unlock a level performing well enough on previous levels.
An animated pixel-art image of a lock unlocking.
Some levels need to be unlocked!
  • I created a new expandable "accordion" panel widget.
    • I can hide less-important details with this widget, and then the user can click on it to expand it, in order to see these details.
    • I'm using this in quite a few screens now.
An animated GIF showing some new interactions in the game over screen.
The game over screen uses the new accordion panel.
  • I made a level-select screen.
    • This automatically determines the next suggested level for the player, and then it automatically scrolls to the corresponding row, and expands that row.
    • This indicates whether a level still needs to be unlocked.
    • This shows a fancy animation when unlocking a new level.
An animated GIF showing some interactions in the new level-select screen.
The level-select screen has some fancy features like
auto scroll, unlock animations, and lots of accordion panels!
  • I did a lot of bug fixing and polish throughout the app.
  • I created an absurd number of icons in different sizes for publishing an app to Android and iOS stores.

What's next?

  • Finally, all of my UI logic should be essentially done!
  • The main thing left to do is create a bunch of levels.
  • And then there is also a little bit more bug fixing to do.
  • Then I can start the process of getting this published in the app stores.


🎉 Cheers!

This is a simple icon representing my sabbatical.

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