October Progress Report (Surveying & Planning)

Surveys & Paperwork

A lot of dev time has been spent on the paperwork side of things this month. Especially when it comes to charting out who gets what rewards and marking down customization answers from the surveys.

Heck, even making the surveys took longer than expected. On the Kickstarter side of things we literally had to recreate each question and selectable option for every reward tier then do it all again for the ones with Add-Ons enabled. After that there was time spent looking around for alternative survey tools on the web. Best free option for what we needed was Google Forms, but even those lacked some of the flexibility we needed, but we made it work well enough.

Menu Resizing

We're also making adjustments to the game's UI to account for all the crazy screen resolutions that are out there. From folding phones much more square-like or skinnier (when folded) than expected, to a number of legacy devices still capable of running this decade's software that we need to account for. 

We've been building anchors into the game's menus to try to make it look good no matter what you play it on. And next we'll need to do the same for Portrait orientations. So we look forward to sharing screenshots of all that when it's ready.

New Demos

Something that's ready right now however is the newest public build, the Combat Overhaul which finally came out so everyone can play using the new calculations formula we're going with that leads to the game feeling more balanced and fun, with less of those unwinnable matchup scenarios we've seen people get stuck in. These demos can now be found on both GameJolt and Itch.io.

YouTube

With that all settled, there's still accounting work to be done (quarterly tax estimates and all that wrapped up this past weekend) and we've been making detailed plans for how to evolve the Yotes Games YouTube channel over the coming year. 

Our sights are set on making templates to produce quality content in bulk and release them periodically so the algorithm considers our channel an active and growing one. We'll have a variety of things to share like breakdowns of major mechanics and ideas, our monthly devlogs, YouTube shorts featuring select bits of gameplay with some comedy thrown in, some soundtrack drops, character spotlights, making of mini-docs, gameplay previews, demo trailers, and more.

Stepping our YouTube game up has been on the To-Do list for far too long and we're excited to show you what we've been chipping away at each and every Wednesday & Friday during our team meetings.