PixiCubes is out the Door

Well PixiCubes, #2 in the 6 month plan, is out. It’s currently available for Pc,Mac,Linux, and Android. I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to do about releasing new cubes.  Each PixiCube takes up around 6-7 Mb which is quite a bit when you have several of them and certainly a lot for a mobile game. For now, if I release any more cubes, I will have to revise the code to do it, but if something unusual happens and a lot of people play it and like it, I will probably go in and make modifications so I can release new content without having to re-release a new binary. This would of course mean that I’d have to host the files on my site, but that should be fine. Something else I decided to do for this one was to put Ads in the mobile versions.  When you solve a face there is currently a 50% chance you’ll see an ad which isn’t too bad in my opinion. I also added a “Please Rate Me” dialog that comes up after you solve a whole PixiCube. I figure if the person plays the game long enough to solve 6 puzzles, then they probably like it enough to give a good rating. We’ll see. The game also has a tutorial which isn’t very long, but took me about 1.5 days to implement. I ended up doing some pretty big refactoring to my main game code so I could use many of the same methods in the tutorial. It worked out really well, and I remember doing the same for my first mobile game TerraForma.

I think today I will look into getting a build going for iOS and test it on the phone I have. If it works OK I’ll try to get it submitted to iTunes for an iOS release. At this point I just want someone to play it.

My plans for April are going to be flexible since Ludum Dare is next weekend. I’m going to spend next week getting ready and adding,fixing,polishing my editor scripts for Unity. There is a thought in the back of my mind that I should break from Unity for this Ludum Dare and try HaxeFlixel or Love2D. I’ve wanted to play with Haxe more and I’ve always loved Lua. I’ll think about it next week. I’m thinking that I may take whatever I come up with for this Ludum Dare (if anything) and try to polish it up and release it for my April project, but we’ll see. I’m off to do a Facebook post and a news post on this site for the PixiCubes release.