Shovel Shuffle: Dev. Update

It's quite obvious now that Shovel Shuffle won't be released this year. It failed submission last month and there hasn't been much movement on a solution. It may or may not be scoreboard related.

If I can't get it sorted out by the end of January I'll consider taking scoreboards out, which is a shame because it took about 10 evenings across about a month and a half to put it in. I was making improvements to other parts of the game at the same time, so it's not a total loss.

On the flip side there's time for the art to be changed. Does anyone want to make a little bit of 2D art? I don't think I have anything of value to offer in return.

Introducing Shovel Shuffle

I can now reveal my second PlayStation®Mobile game is called Shovel Shuffle. It's a number puzzle set in an underground mine. The objective is to dig as much as you can without crossing your path.

You dig by selecting a square in the direction you want to travel. The distance you travel is the same as the number written on the square.

I think this is a game for all ages. You can try it for free. If you like it, consider buying the larger stages.

Stay tuned for more details.

Next Game Progress Update

Good news, I've got to the point where my next PSM game is almost ready for release.

Bad news, I jumped on the scoreboard bandwagon and like a few other developers I'm sitting on my hands waiting for the next SDK update because scoreboards are slightly broken at the moment.

Text Rendering Optimisation

I finally got round to optimising the text rendering in my PSM game. I was seeing around 75 ms frame time on my text heavy stats screen because of the large amount of text, it's now down to around 3 ms.

Still here

I'm continuing to make slow progress on my next game. All the core game mechanics have been completed.

I'm now trying to figure out the best way to display scores and various other stats for the user while making it as simple as possible to develop. I thinking of some kind of split between online/offline stats like Vita's trophies app. Fiddling with UI placement is so time consuming. In comparison the UI in Touch Treasure only lets you choose the game mode or proceed to the next screen.

The game is quite ambitious for my attention span but I think it's still possible it will see a release. There's so much left to do. I was going to list it all but ended up deleting that part of the post because it looks like too much work.