Release Data Announcement

It has been more than 4 months since my previous devlog. I have been working very hard on the game and I’m ready to announce the release date of Squirrel Launcher.

If all goes according to plan, on January 4^th, 2023, I will be releasing the game on Steam, Google Play, and itch.io.

Here is the link to the current Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2254490/Squirrel_Launcher/

The itch.io version will contain a play-in-browser version and an APK file download for Android. While only Steam will contain the Windows version.

The definitive version will be the one on Steam. It will have the most features.

Now that that part’s over, let’s go over what I’ve been doing for the past 4 months.

Closed Beta

I conducted a closed beta on version 0.4 to test how the game plays. Ultimately, I learned a lot from this and I’m very glad I did it. I will be doing these for other games in the future. The game did have a few issues with clarity and pacing but they were all worked out to the best of my ability. I also used much of the feedback I’ve received to do small tweaks to dialogue or gameplay segments to make them more enjoyable.

Reworked Graphics

Every area of the game got a graphics overhaul in preparation for the final release. Not only that, but I bumped up the resolution on the assets so now I have verified they all will look crisp up to a 4K resolution.

I have posted some new screenshots if you’d like to look at them.

Steam and Google Play Integration

This is what I’ve been doing for most of the last two weeks. Not only have been setting up the store pages for Steam and Google Play, but I needed to add support for their achievements and leaderboards. The original Squirrel Launcher on Scratch had a high score system, so I wanted to have one for each level in the modern version.

It was easy to do Google Play’s system. All I needed to do was download their Unity package and follow the documentation. Steam was a little more difficult to set up because they didn’t use Unity’s built-in social interface, but I figured it out and got it working. The leaderboards won’t start working on Steam until Steam enables them though.

Adding cloud saves to Steam was as easy as specifying the folder that the saved files were in. Google Play was a different story. I tried, but their implementation of cloud saves requires the individual files to be entirely controlled by Google’s servers. I couldn’t just say: “grab this folder” I needed to make the game call to the server every time a save file is saved or loaded. It also needed to support changes from the outside. I decided not to go through with it as the number of changes made to accommodate it were enormous and scary. The game threw too many errors so filled with fear I removed all the code that controlled that functionality. Google Play will not have cloud saves but Steam will. Obviously itch.io is already based in the cloud so yeah.

Conclusion

I don’t know for certain that people are reading these all the way though. I use these mostly to organize my thoughts but if for some reason there is someone who reads these. Thank you. I wrote many of these types of things for Procedural Dungeons, but I never posted them publicly.

I already have an idea for the next game I will be making so expect a new game announcement sometime in the next six months.