27th of March 2024
Good afternoon!
I fiddled around with the time progress bar functionality and graphics yesterday a bit, and opted to implement the feedback that player control is disabled and time is frozen with, well, frozen graphics. I also added a minor "burn" visual to the active time bar.
At least for now it seems to work quite well, there's a lot less confusion on when you can manipulate the gems yourself. The update is currently live with v0.3.19 and up for testing! There's a weird discrepancy tho, between built versions and in-editor, as in the timing is mildly wrong on the builds. I will have to figure out why that's happening and fix that.
I've been pondering my next steps, and I think the biggest step is to implement and improve account management. The game automatically creates a PlayFab account with a custom UUID that's created at first play. For Android, this means that if you uninstall the game, you will lose access to your account. So I'll probably start there, add linking to this customID with AndroidDeviceID so that the account won't be lost on phones on uninstall. For Google Play and GDPR compliance, I also need to have a method of deleting all player data and account, so that's going to be implemented after that. This account deletion will be in the WebGL version too. I am also thinking about adding a Link To Google Account, for the ability to get back to your account from another device, tho it would require some specific pondering and planning to get it properly working and have the correct workflow.
In the meantime, I'll keep trying to fix outstanding (and newly introduced bugs), and fiddling around with the leaderboard implementation. After the account management has been handled, I'll be going for ads for Android (WebGL version won't have ads, but also won't have all the features either - for example, push notifications on stuff like winning a daily, or being a top 3 on a monthly or so on leaderboards probably won't be there). I'll have decide in the future how and what I'll separate between the versions, but I will be keeping at least some version on itch.io with WebGL version.