An Odyssey Around the Dot Universe
You don't know the story of the Dot Universe? Let me tell you the story of the massive game that isn't massive at all. This game was originally meant to have a PC variant (hence why it is a massive game). Maybe sometime in the future, we will release the PC variant. I know I love the PC version because of its… *DRUM ROLL PLEASE*... story mode. BAM! Queue the heroic explosions in the background. If you looked at the state of the mobile game, you wouldn't know that there is a story mode to this whole arcade game. It was meant to be more than just an arcade game.
As our first game to be launched to the public, it will always be a cherished piece of work. I remember there was this one week when I became bored and was looking at the graphic assets. I realized we were going about the way these assets are created all wrong. Everything looked very pixelated with a lot of artifacting around the edges. I guess a word from the wise: when working with an aesthetic that resembles neons, make sure you render everything at a high resolution. Neons require multiple stages to its glow. I guess 3 stages are ideal. The first stage is the densest form of glow. Nearest to the object. The second stage is the intermediate stage. It branches outwards a little bit farther than the first stage at a lower opacity. The third stage branches out the most, at an even lower opacity. This level of rendering the details adds an intense level of depth. One way that our aesthetic differs from actual neon, we don't have an intense inner glow to the objects. Like the white, hot intense inside of a light tube.
Now let's talk about bugs. This game had way too many. Being our first production app, in the middle of a pandemic, debugging this app was more of a nightmare than anything. One of the bugs was straight up from the way the app was handling music. Another one was dealing with the hitboxes. Sometimes, the hitbox would be in an area that didn't have any obstacles to hit. As this was our first production-level app on a platform we've never really played with before, we've had to spend more time than usual looking back and trying to figure out where things were going wrong.
Our first app launch was very lackluster, to say the least. Some of the challenges we ran into were just the kickbacks from the pandemic. In the year 2020, publishing apps as a small business startup on Google Play was extremely difficult. Their support staff took a full quarter of a year to review your apps and get back to you. Not to even mention the fact that android studio would change up their syntax and code libraries on a whim, causing your code to be up to date one week and deprecated the next. Nonetheless, we pushed through and made this app for the people.
The Dot Odyssey gameplay consists of the user chasing dots around the screen while avoiding the obstacles that appear. That is the simplest way to explain it. We also have a whole bunch of mazes for you to go through. That's when the game starts to feel a little bit like PacMan but instead of ghosts, your opponents are the walls and the speed that the cursor moves in based on the level.