Tip Tap Cat Completed and Live

https://cedarcatstudios.itch.io/

Overview

After what feels like more than a month and a half, I have been able to fully release my third game Tip Tap Cat! I have been able to release the game on my itch.io creator page as well as the Apple Store and Google Play Store. It is free on all platforms and I hope anyone here wants to try the game and let me know your thoughts. This game was a lot of fun to create and it made me realize why I love doing this game jam and being a hobbyist developer so much. I look forward to my next game, but hope this one brings anyone that plays it some enjoyment :) 

I will eventually do another video where I break down the Unity project for Tip Tap Cat, but a few things I would like to highlight about what I was glad I was able to include in time and also what I was not able to implement. Below are a few of those thoughts.

What I was able to implement

• The leaderboard mechanic
• New Unity Input System touch controls as well as mouse controls
  • Wow the new input system is great now that I have figured it out
• Using scriptable objects saved a bunch of time and something I will use more often
• Creating my own classes
• A color pallet 
  • A criticism I received on Terrier Tennis was the color pallet was all over the place. I spent a lot more time on this game making sure the colors didn't clash
• A refined UI and music options plus a volume slider
  • I really liked how the slider only affects the music and not sound effects. I had to leverage the Unity audio mixer for this and it was pretty great.
• Optimizing performance. 
  • Previous games I never had to worry about this, but it was great having to focus on this for mobile and making sure the game performed well on all platforms
• Releasing on the Apple and Google Play Stores
  • Wow this was a lot of work. After finishing the game it took me at least a full week to figure this out. There are a lot of tutorials online for how to do this, but none show how difficult and frankly scary this is. There was a lot of legal information I didn't know how to navigate. Because of this, I ended up just releasing the mobile versions of the game in the USA and made it free.

What I wasn't able to implement

• Persisting user data
  • Loot Locker was a great tool to leverage, but I could not figure out in time how to identify a device as a unique user and call that on game load. I did a lot of research into this and found you would need to write to the device a string and retrieve it on game load. This required higher permissions the app needs on the device. I did not want to go that far this time, so I decided to just skip it.
• Music from local musicians
  • I was able to use free-use music for this game, but I would love to find local musicians in my city and allow them to get a credit in my game. Maybe another game will feature their music
• More customizations
  • The different colored balls and music was a start, but I would like to add more features (and maybe unlockables) so users are excited to keep coming back 
• The opposite versions of the Pawer Ups and more Pawer Ups
  • I had a lot of ideas to add more Pawer Ups and create bad versions of them. However, with the time constraints I had I ended up not including them. This would be something I could see myself coming back to and adding just for the fun of it. Especially if people actually end up playing this game.

What's next?

I think I would love to make a console game as part of this game jam, but in an effort of time (since the holidays are coming up and this jam will be over before I know it) I think the next project for me will be another mobile game that will be more story and gameplay driven than Tip Tap Cat. I was able to figure out touch controls, but now I would like to try and take it a step further and see if I can make a 3D mobile game with more involved touch inputs. 

However, I would like to take a break for the Holiday's and maybe go back to a good book for a bit before jumping back into development. Stay tuned though, as I will make another video soon breaking down how I developed Tip Tap Cat.