Reflex – Dev Diary 77 – Tweaking

This week continues the final stages of development for Reflex. The focus this time has been on Achievements for the Steam and Google Play versions of the game.

First up was to get an official build ready for submission to Google Play. Thankfully YoYoGames has a reasonably helpful document about setting up a game and integrating the extension. The downside is the supplied game project that is supposed to explain how it works is badly documented. Anyway, the process for signing up to be a Google Play developer is a long and particularly complex affair. And once again required a whole new set of graphics and the achievement icons all needed to be saved out at yet another resolution. After about 4 hours the process was complete and I had set up Reflex on Google Play for internal testing.

Next came the process of getting a build onto the Google Play store so I could install it on my tablet and try it out. 12 builds later and I had adapted the game to sign in to Google Play and start to post achievement details.

Previously, the achievements were saved as a part of the settings for the game. After implementing the functionality in the Android version I realised that they needed to be synced rather than using local data. This is because, if an Android player decided to sign out of Google Play and then sign in as a different user the achievements would match up with the new account.

So, after a lot of fiddling about (thanks Google), the Achievements are now synced when the game starts or the player signs in for both Steam and Google Play.

After getting a nice and stable Android build I sat down and played through most of the game (yikes). This highlighted a couple of very minor issues that needed addressing. Here’s this weeks changelog: