Polara - (by Hope This Works) - Universal App

[Syen]

Originally Posted by HTWGames

Glad to have you on board Syen! Sorry to give you such a dilemma hahaha but I hope you dig the game man. Enjoy yourself for all the self control you displayed

I love it so far!

[Connector]

Originally Posted by HTWGames

During our development time both the ipad 3 and the iphone 5 came out and with the amount of time and available resources we had to decide to just get what we could out the door ASAP. Depending on some circumstances, there may be a possibility to go back and redo certain textures, etc. but we're a super indie company and it could possibly bloat the size of the app WAY beyond trying to optimize it below 50 meg(we had it down but Apple adds a couple meg and we tipped over 50 ). Not to give excuses, just more a sense of reality in terms of being able to meet expectations as quickly as possible, supporting and making sure we cover all bases can be tricky when hardware comes out half way through the production and all your art has to be redone. It's hard to manage sometimes haha

Have you ever thought about going the other way and just making the game like 150 mbs or less and adding a little better graphics? I'm not saying going to ipad retina and all, bit since right now you are kind of handcuffed on space as it is, maybe it would help the game to forget about the 50 mb restriction, and add some things to the game with a little better graphics.

On my iphone this game looks retively ok, but on the new ipad it would be vastly improved with a little better graphics. Anyway, this will be my last question about this, if you could take a second to address this. If sales are much better from the less than 50 mb thing, or other things, please let us know. Thanks.

[HTWGames]

Originally Posted by Connector

Have you ever thought about going the other way and just making the game like 150 mbs or less and adding a little better graphics? I'm not saying going to ipad retina and all, bit since right now you are kind of handcuffed on space as it is, maybe it would help the game to forget about the 50 mb restriction, and add some things to the game with a little better graphics.

On my iphone this game looks retively ok, but on the new ipad it would be vastly improved with a little better graphics. Anyway, this will be my last question about this, if you could take a second to address this. If sales are much better from the less than 50 mb thing, or other things, please let us know. Thanks.

I've actually gone back to look at increasing the res and redoing all the textures... it's a large pile of work to be done. I'm going to see what I can do but honestly it's like a years worth of work to sift through at the moment haha

I'll be really upfront with you. We don't have a lot of money...actually we used all of the tiny amount of money we got off the limited success of the Kunundrum launch. I haven't drawn a salary in two years... honestly, I haven't made a dime in 2 years. So the resources were limited to say the least and it was a shit-ton of work to take care of everything. The end credits almost embarrass me a little because my name is all over the damn thing, but we're so grass roots that I had to put on many a hat But that's business and it takes time to grow.

We had to make concessions where I would have loved to poured a lot of time and money on so many things, but it just wasn't there. It's not an easy business to get into, but it's even harder to maintain. This is a dream of mine and I left a number of jobs behind to do this. Without any funding or backing, belts tighten and sadly features lessen. I know a number of high quality artists that I would love to commission(top tier industry types) if they would take the job on, but without the cash to both support your business and contractors, the DIY factor rises.

We'll see how this launch goes and where we all are in terms of support and funding. I would love to intensify everything! I mean hell I'm a UI Artist by nature and I hardly got any time on that even. I'm sorry if it's falling short on any level for you, I really am.

Technology refreshes itself so many times during a cycle that if you're not right there, you can get left behind. I don't want that to happen, but with this issue in front of me there wasn't much I could do as money and time had both hands tied behind my back.

I had a composer I was so happy with that wanted to work with us but even that small price couldn't be paid and again we ran out of time... it's never ending haha So we had to make a decision and we went with what we created. Most of what you see in game cost us nothing because it came directly from resourefulness and effort. And for that I'm pretty proud

Anyway... we will try to increase the quality level of our titles as we grow. But if we can't grow I'm afraid quality will be the least our of worries haha Instead how about...what am I going to eat for 0 dollars hahahaha

[Bytebrain]

Originally Posted by Connector

Have you ever thought about going the other way and just making the game like 150 mbs or less and adding a little better graphics? I'm not saying going to ipad retina and all, bit since right now you are kind of handcuffed on space as it is, maybe it would help the game to forget about the 50 mb restriction, and add some things to the game with a little better graphics.

On my iphone this game looks retively ok, but on the new ipad it would be vastly improved with a little better graphics. Anyway, this will be my last question about this, if you could take a second to address this. If sales are much better from the less than 50 mb thing, or other things, please let us know. Thanks.

Even though I think the in game visuals are adequate and the cut scene art is excellent, I agree completely.
Most people have access to wifi at some point during the day, and personally it's never been an issue for me..
I believe the 50 mb limit might sometimes detrimental to some games visuals and sound quality.

I've at level 46 now and I'm at a point now where I suspect your level designer is actually evil!!
Loving the game regardless..

[Connector]

HTWGames,

Thanks! Great game, keep up the great work!

[HTWGames]

Originally Posted by Bytebrain

Even though I think the in game visuals are adequate and the cut scene art is excellent, I agree completely.
Most people have access to wifi at some point during the day, and personally it's never been an issue for me..
I believe the 50 mb limit might sometimes detrimental to some games visuals and sound quality.

I've at level 46 now and I'm at a point now where I suspect your level designer is actually evil!!
Loving the game regardless..

Tim is evil.


And we actually were at like 48.7mb and were hoping it would make it...but Apple puts stuff into the binary that pushed it over and ugh....

[Bytebrain]

Originally Posted by EightRooks

God damn it I wasn't even seeing 2->3 as a straight blue. Jesus Christ. I did honestly mean what I said (at the time, at least) - it wasn't meant as bitching, I do think there are sometimes games where you have to admit to yourself "No, this is beyond me" and give in - but I was liking it enough I couldn't resist trying it just a few more times and yeah, my mistake, slapped wrists.

On the other hand, though, it's definitely not just my getting fixated on the wrong thing (since I was making it right near the end of that section even attempting it incorrectly). I'm getting some horrible lag after playing several levels in a row on my iTouch 4G, and it gets continuous minor stutters on my Android tablet (a dual-core OMAP, I think, at 1 Gig, with 512 MB of RAM). Neither device registers touchscreen presses one hundred percent of the time, especially not when done very quickly as I was attempting to do (jump and then instantly switch or vice versa), and I've died countless times when it's simply not been my fault. I've kept at it - since, well, I feel the game's just that good when it works - but I could see this keeping me from completing it if the later levels really do demand the kind of rapid-fire inputs I was trying there.

There's been several places like this in the game for me, where I just couldn't see how it's solvable. After making it past those points, when revisiting the levels later, they are much easier..

I haven't had any issues with the touchscreen registering, in fact, I find it remarkable precise, but I'm playing on an iPad 3.
As mentioned by the Dev, it may just be a memory leak.
I've had those many times on my iPhone 3GS, ancient thing as it is.. A reboot have solved it for the most part, although lately, after the last two iOS releases, even games that looks like the phone should have no problem handling have begun to stutter..
Maybe I should have kept it on iOS 4..

Games like Mikey Shorts runs badly on my iPhone now. And that's a Phone that used to run Infinity Blade...

[rbates]

Regarding the retina graphics. I think improving the resolution of the main girl would go a long way towards making it look better. She looks pixelated and everything else passes by so quickly it's not as noticeable.

I hope this game takes off enough to support you and the other devs. I would love to see more games from you guys.

[slewis7]

I am not too concerned about the graphics; I think they look pretty good on my iPad 3. After all, this game is really about the game play challenge.

One thing I would like to see added is a Game Center leaderboard that reflects progress on the story mode. I could see a couple of ways of doing it. One way is to simple reflect the number of levels where a flawless is achieved, although the granularity would be quite low. An alternative would be to assign points to each type of goal achieved (each letter, special, etc) and show the total points.

[lena]

I also found level 15 much harder than the levels that preceeded and followed it. It required a brain switch that I didn't immediately make, apparently. I had that at more times, that the difficulty progression seemed a bit off. Not a big deal though, and it is interesting to see here that others had that with other levels. I saw level 19 mentioned as super hard for example, so I worried when I got there after struggling with 15 but I found it not so hard. I still find 15 difficult, I have all the polara until then, but I cannot get that last A near those circles near the end. No problem though, there's still so much to do and I'll get back to it later.

I find the endless modes quite hard and they feel a bit too random for me. I'll probably get a bit better at pattern recognition over time, but still, my high score at random normal is only 748 and even that was mostly luck.

I voted for this as GOTW. Found it difficult to choose between this and Crazy Taxi. I chose this one mainly because it just works much better on my iPad 1 and therefore it got a lot more gameplay than Crazy Taxi, so it seemed only fair to vote for Polara, even though the games are impossible to compare otherwise.

I love that the filesize is so small for such a big game. I don't really buy runners anymore and have also been disappointed in too many platformers. This one looked interesting enough, the price was low, no IAP's, but if the filesize would have been large, I would have to make room on my device and probably not have gone through the trouble. I recently even deleted Crazy Hedgy, which is one of my favorite games ever, because of space concerns.

I really like slewis7's idea of leaderboards with points for each letter! I hope you'll consider something like that.