Week 9: Inner-Tube Climber has launched! Watch the trailer, and download the app!

tl;dr: 🎉 Inner-Tube Climber has launched! Watch the trailer, and download the app!

What happened last week?

• I launched Inner-Tube Climber on the Play Store and App Store this morning!
• NOTE: The App Store is apparently still processing the release, and isn't showing the app yet. But it should be visible later today or tomorrow at the latest.
• Created a trailer!
• I found this GMTK video helpful for thinking about how to structure my trailer.
• I like using free tools whenever possible, so I found Lightworks for editing my video.
• I didn't find it very intuitive to use, but once I figured out how to do all the basic stuff, I made good progress with it.
• My main complaint is that they wouldn't let me export the trailer in a decent resolution without paying for the premium version, which is quite expensive.
• So I'll probably find another editor to use next time I need to make a game trailer.
• New features:
• Created a new cairn sprite to mark the locations of secrets and extra lives.
• Updated the game to not decrement lives when dying on the first tier.
• Otherwise, you should always just reset the level, which would give you back your full set of lives. But that's a tedious and unsatisfying user experience.
• Updated easy difficulty to have infinite lives.
• Disabled extra-lives after the first loop.
• Started giving bonus score for extra lives.
• Added another mobile control input version:
• Made reversing sideways direction based on drag distance since the last drag motion in the other direction (rather than on simple drag velocity, which is what the previous control version did).
• I support switching between different control versions in the settings menu.
• There are now 4 different control versions!
• Updated difficulty and mobile control options to never be disabled in the settings menu.
• Now, navigating to the settings menu while in the middle of a level will cause the level to restart.
• I added an interstitial "are you sure" screen to let the player know this.
• Add messages to the credits level:
• “You beat the game!”
• “Congratulations!”
• Added a “Special Thanks” section in the credits screen.
• Updated silver-rank score thresholds for the combo levels.
• Started tracking settings changes in Google Analytics.
• Level updates:
• Did a lot more level polish.
• I tried to again make things easier throughout the game.
• Rewrote tier 24.
• It was way too hard with fiddly jumps between small icy platforms.
• Bug fixes:
• Added support for uploading recent gesture events for debugging.
• One of my playtesters was seeing input bugs that I couldn't reproduce, so this should help with that.
• Updated mobile control input to possibly fix some jump event false negatives.
• Fixed a bug with the player sometimes not moving sideways after clearing the top of a wall when the user is pressing sideways.
• Publishing:
• Fixed a really tedious bug, where the app would crash when loading, but only when deployed remotely, and not when run locally.
• The issue essentially boiled down to a circular dependency between Godot autoload singletons.
• Created still more required screenshots for the App Store.
• They require you to upload four collections of screenshots at different screen sizes, which is very tedious to put together.
• I thought I could just get away with two sizes before, but alas...
• Fixed various small bugs that surfaced in the iOS build:
• Using Tweens that aren’t yet attached to the scene tree.
• Connecting to `tween_complete` signal twice for a given tween.
• Godot on iOS apparently reports an error when calling `ConfigFile.get_value` for a key that doesn’t yet exist, even when providing a default value.
• Another instance of referencing an already-garbage-collected object.
• Debugged a very annoying issue with the App Store review process.
• It was telling me that my build would crash on boot, but I could not repro on my device.
• After some research, it seems like this was happening because I had started building on our new M1-chip-based Macbook Air, and using the different processor had an affect on the generated build.
• So I just went back to building it on the old laptop.
• It sounds like this is the problem and solution if I want to get this working on the new laptop in the future:
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/63955114/489568
• Added a couple new play-testers.

Some new cairn art, for marking the locations of secrets and extra lives.

What's next?

• App promotion!
• Now that Inner-Tube Climber is launched, it's time to get people to see it!
• I'm planning to spend a chunk of this week researching how and where to promote Inner-Tube Climber.
• You are more than welcome to share it around too!
• Then I'll pull-out some reusable infrastructure logic from Inner-Tube Climber into an independent framework that I can re-use in my next games.

🎉 Cheers!

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