Now that Ludum Dare weekend has passed, and the iOS releases are in place, it is time to turn to next projects.
Smiling Cat’s 9th game will be Breaking Block, the block breaker game I’ve mentioned in prior posts. I’m continuing to add more crunchiness to the game, and all features for the game should be completed relatively quickly. I just this week realized that I am moving at a pace of one release per month so far this year (Vintage Pachinko 2.0, Vintage Pachinko 2.1, Prepare for Warp 1.1, and City Beneath the Surface). That would mean an end-of-May release for Breaking Block, but I’m not sure that will work out. It might wind up being more like mid-June.
The entire website went through a “refresh” this week. With just me running things, sometimes pages don’t get updated when they are supposed to, and things like Update Histories get out of date. I visited every corner of the site and reviewed it, and made a lot of updates. Of special note is the Privacy Policy changes, which now affirm that we do targeted advertising based on approved device identifiers, and beyond that we do not share data and only use it for internal aggregate analysis.
Page layouts were cleaned up, missing information was added, some CSS styles that have experienced undesirable mutations thanks to WP updates have been irradiated, and the blog history has been collapsed into a dropdown since this blog has now been running for close to 4 years. A new link menu “Game Downloads (PC)” has been provided to denote games that are available for direct download (only Ludum Dare entries right now). The game links now go to the game’s landing page rather than directly to Kong, Google Play, or AppStore, since many of the games now have multiple choices in that regard. Those are the big changes, there are also a bunch of little ones.
If you notice anything amiss from this update, please let me know. I know I fixed a couple of missing images in the days after the update. I really have to learn WordPress a bit more, so I can template some more stuff out (i.e. the game pages).
I do have yet another prototype in the works, it could wind up being game #10 for Smiling Cat. Way to early to reveal any more than that, though.