Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Some more information on the next update

I thought I'd shed a little more light on the next update I am working on. As you may have already read in my previous post, I am working on adding a Colosseum to the application, however, aside from this there will be a few other changes as well. These are minor chances to aesthetics of the application and the way some things work, but I thought I would list them up and post them anyway.

At the time of writing this post, I have implemented the following small changes to the application thus far:

  • Changed the animations in the Def and Atk training mini-games,
  • Made it so that if your pet runs a lot of 'laps' on the treadmill, he will lose more weight than normal,
  • Balanced some of the higher level pets and made them harder to 'get',
  • Made the higher level pets less needy, as they are adults, they are expected to control their 'urges'.
Not a very long list of changes, I admit, but more changes will be added as needed later on. Although I said I wanted to keep the blog for smaller posts, I feel that I have something to make up because of the long period of radio silence after the initial release of the application.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Long awaited update

It has been quite a long time since I last posted a blog update, so here goes!
I have been a little busy with other things so I wasn't able to work on the application as much as I would have wanted to. Although I have been updating the application over the past few weeks and trying to fix bugs people ran into, I didn't do anything worth posting about on the blog. As I believe the blog to be for bigger things than bug fixes, as these will be posted on my Twitter feed.

In this paragraph I would like to thank all the people who bought the application. I hope that everyone is having fun with it! I would also like to thank the people who have contacted me with bugs and comments on the application over the past three weeks, as well as people who were kind enough to rate the application on the Android Market. And if there are any people out there that find the application to be dull, I hope that I will be able to keep your attention with further updates. 

Speaking of which, in this post I would like to introduce a few screenshots of the 'Colosseum' mode I have been working on for the past few days. In short, the Colosseum mode is a mode where your pet can fight computer generated pets and compete in competitions in order to increase your Colosseum Rank. When the update hits the Market, people will find that the 'Bluetooth Battle' option in the menu has changed to 'Battle', clicking this will open up a select screen where people can select either 'Bluetooth' or 'Colosseum', as shown below.


Clicking the right and left menu buttons will cycle through the menu and clicking the middle button will confirm your choice. After clicking on Colosseum, one will be confronted with two statistics, the Colosseum Rank and Experience level. As one fights battles in the Colosseum, one will gain experience points and if enough experience points are gathered, one will increase in rank. Just like a usual RPG training and leveling up system I suppose. I haven't decided yet on what kind of merits will come with a higher rank, although I am currently thinking of making certain evolutions easier if one has a higher Colosseum rank.




From the this first screen, one can cycle through a number of screens. The Colosseum is divided in three levels of difficulty; the Novice, Champion and Elite levels. Each level has twelve Colosseum Tournaments, each of which are won by fighting three matches. In the image above one can see three different types of squares, the big open squares are Tournaments that haven't been won yet, the big black squares indicate that that particular Tournament has already been won ( one can however participate again ). Finally, the little black squares indicate a Tournament that hasn't been unlocked yet. Some matches will only unlock after a certain Colosseum rank has been achieved.

I believe that this covers the initial introduction of the Colosseum mode pretty well. There are still some little things that need tweaking with the Colosseum mode, so I won't be releasing this update yet.

Aside from including a the above mentioned mode, I will also be changing some of the animals statistics. It appears that it is quite easy to get a pet to evolve up until generation 5, so I will be making it a little bit harder in the future. And there will be some other minor tweaks in the way stuff works, however this will be further elaborated upon once the time comes.

And this concludes this blog post. If there are any questions, feel free to post a comment, email or tweet. Also, I hope that people like the idea of the Colosseum mode as portrayed in this post.