Idle Space Ship released on the play store for android. Pre release but the base functionality of the game is there. Several observations about releasing for the play store. It's easy, and pretty quick.

I already had a developers account, but at a 25$ one time fee, makes it pretty cheap for anyone to obtain. Releasing an app, wasn't much different. The one and only issue I had was on Unity's end. Getting the correct settings to make it compatible with their standards. That and me not having the needed art assets yet. This being only my second time releasing something though, it still only took a few minutes.

The review period between uploading and publishing was slightly shorter. It released earlier than I expected. First time took 7 days, this one took 5 days. That's not all the waiting though. For the first two days, it wasn't even searchable, Except by company name. Then the next day if I removed the spaces and made it all one word, it would show up several pages down. Now its finally searchable by name, about 4 days later.

Let's talk asteroids

I like to keep the pace of the game as is, but still allow other ways of generating income. Mainly to speed up income without just speeding up the game, and give the player more to do. I contemplated passive income. Thematically I didn't like the idea, and didn't want to force it in. In a previous iteration, I had the concept of a shield you had to maintain as asteroid hit it on the way to the planet. So I went back, and stripped the shield portion out. I want to bring it back with the combat idea I have too, but much later down the road.

For now, instead of the shields they'll be replaced by a cannon. The cannon will have its own damage and speed upgrades. It will only be able to shoot asteroids in front of it. If you manage to destroy an asteroid it will reward money equal to a small portion of what you get for the current planet. I'm not sure if I want to let the player gain an even smaller portion for the asteroids they don't destroy… or keep it at no gain at all. Since the goal is to increase income rate, I'm gonna try it out a couple ways before making that decision.

Now each planet will also start with 0 - 5 asteroids. that all approach the player and fly by, which does a nice job simulating the speed and distance. Asteroids don't accelerate like the ship does, instead they all have random speeds. Well sorta, internally there's five speeds available and each speed can only be assigned to one asteroid. the times are all calculated to be how long it would take the asteroid to go from starting position to end position in 4, 8, 12, 16, or 20 seconds. The values of the asteroids don't change though. They are all worth 10% of the total planet value. Even at 10% it seems really high when you get 4-5 asteroids alot.

I also wrote the way it chooses how many planets similar to any ARPG loot system out there, to better control the amount of asteroids. I typically want there to always be 1 but have a chance that there could be 0. The problems comes when all I'm doing is choosing a random number. So i assigned percentage chances that each one will show up. 1 asteroids = 80%, 2 asteroids = 60%… 5 asteroids = 10%… going down the line. The game starts at 1 and rolls a chance. For each value that succeeds it tries to go up a 1 more asteroid till it reaches 5 or fails and choose the current value. So a 10% chance for 5 asteroids is actually much lower cause the system has to pass every chance before it as well.

What about help

I probably should've done this in the first place, but I'll be adding a help system to explain the interface and how to play. Simple overlays to explain the basic features of the UI. I feel I didn't explain the farming toggle or the basic concept of how to play. Though I hope its intuitive if you've played the genre before.

Monetization

I'll be adding in a reward ad system too next release. Still wrapping my head around this one. It's deceptively easy to implement. Until you go to build and Unity looses its mind and decides to forget how to use your computers file system. Using AdMob, Unity decided it no longer knew where OpenJDK was installed despite having the correct path to it. Funny so many people with the same error, tons having the luck of simply unchecking and rechecking a one box. In the end I had to download a version of the JDK before 8, and when Unity complained I wasn't using the required version. Unity decided to let me know that it had this version installed over here if I wanted to use that. I said that's nice of you, thank you…. ugh, technology sometimes.

Endstep

I'll get into better detail next entry. Along with a new release hopefully by end of next week. Working mostly on the art assets and a little testing and number tweaking.

Till next time, Happy coding.