Last week was a very exciting one for us here, at Total Eclipse, as we announced that we’re currently working on the port of A Clockwork Brain for Android! We’ve actually been studiously tinkering away at it for the last couple of months, using the Unity 3D game engine to speed up the multi-platform development process.

Now that the secret’s out, we’d like to introduce a DevLog so that we can share the porting’s progress with you. A DevLog, which is an abbreviation for ‘Developers’ Log,’ is usually a short summary on how the development of a project is going. Our DevLog won’t be limited to programming progress, but will include all aspects of the production. You can expect a DevLog post every Monday, summing up the previous week. At this inaugural DevLog post, I thought I’d let you know about the overall shape of things first. Here is what the state of the game was last Monday, 22/9:

Unity Project fully setup with git version control enabled.

Main Menu buttons and background are placed and can be navigated.

90% of the Art Assets have been re-exported in high resolution in order to support xxhdpi devices (looking at you, Kindle Fire HDX at 2560×1600, 339ppi).

The Challenge Mode Manager is done – you can now fully play a Challenge game from start to end, including instructions and Score results!

Challenge Shuffle/Select games: You can now select which games you’d like to play in a Challenge.

Single Game Mode: The game selection screen is done, and you can now choose a single game to play. The Tokens information and the high scores are left to be done.

Seven mini-games out of thirteen, are now finished*: (Scrolling Silhouettes, Anagrams, Chase The Numbers, Missing Tiles, Directions, Points of View, Label It.)

*We do QA for every version and tweak bugs that might creep up. By finished, I mean 99% working with the expected behaviour, but there might be some polishing and tweaking left to do.

Week 22/9-28/9

This week we finished porting Speed Match, worked on a few bugs that came up after testing, and began work on Sculpt Away. Sculpt Away is a complex game to port because of how the tiles are being constructed so we expect that to take a little longer than usual, something around 4 days in total. The positive side is that this ’tile manager’ we’ll re-develop can later be used again porting other similar games; such as Size Matters and Logic Tiles. We’ve also been gathering important ASO (App Store Optimisation) data on the new App Stores that we are targeting, such as Google Play and Amazon. For example:

How many screenshots we need and their dimensions

Description and Keywords optimisation (ASO)

Featuring opportunities

Lastly, we are creating a report with each store’s submission and reviewing guidelines so that we ensure everything goes smoothly with our submission. That’s all for this week! Questions? Comments? Let us know! 🙂

Maria Sifnioti – Producer