Hi guys, I launched a Lemmings-style game on the App Store about 6 months ago, just as a tester to see if there was any interest. It's called Turtle Trench. I'm currently in the process of releasing the full-paid version (basically a lot more levels of increased complexity). Now, I've not done any promotion for the Lite version (I really just wanted to get it out there and move on to other things). Anyhow, it gets maybe 10 downloads a day (on the first few days it was like 100-200 downloads a day though), and everyone seems to give it good reviews (5*'s). Just wondered if there was anything worthwhile doing to promote the game, and if there were any obvious things you thought the game was missing. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IRV2my2PYA Screenshot: App Store: Turtle Trench Lite - free version Turtle Trench - paid version (99 cents) Thanks for your time.
I've created a video now (amended first post). I'm going to follow some people's advice about posting on blogger sites, and review sites. But I'll need to figure out how to get promo codes to give out.
Cute animations. Downloading. Haven't played yet, but from the video, a friendly suggestion on the characters: you have a strong light coming from one side. Good way to create depth by having one side lit and the other in shadow. However it's very prominent, and you use the same sprite (reversed) when they walk the opposite direction, so the lighting then looks 'wrong'. A softer more global lighting would also make the characters more readable on those backgrounds, or a tight hilight around the back.
Thanks, I think you're right there. I've not done much tweaking on the animations. I think I'll re-render them when I release a Retina-quality version. I'm was also thinking I could have a fresh model for each world e.g. Sky levels - much softer ambient lighting. Cave levels - a little softer ambient lighting. Snow levels - similar to sky levels, a little more gray with some snow covered on the shells. I think it'd be wasteful to double up on animations for Walking Left/Right. I currently have a Sprite Sheet (1024x1024) almost full for all the possible animations for the Turtle. I'm trying to keep resources quite minimal. I was also thinking of introducing bad turtles (like CPU controlled turtles), distinguished by having a different hue-shift, or different helmet color (black helmet, or blue helmet), whose purpose is to do things like dig, or explode either randomly, or at a determined time, or when close to normal turtles. I wonder if such a hue shift could be performed with shaders (I have zero knowledge of shaders), or if I'll have to just have 2 sprite sheets and see if that fits in the GPU memory (an additional 4MB, probably not too bad - or maybe an 8-bit gray-shade texture, 1MB, of just the helmet portion of the model for all animations...).
