Apple Approval | Patreon Weekly #108

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, the eighth Patreon Livestream happened last Saturday. You can check out the VOD here.

In this weekly I’ve got some big news about iOS, and some new storefront screenshots to show off. Sorry for the drought of actual game content news, I’ve been a bit tied up with patches and iOS polish. I’m now ready to move full steam ahead on v0.9.4 though, so expect a lot more info on that in next week’s weekly.

App Store Approval

It’s been a few days since I released the latest TestFlight built with Firebase Analytics. While I’d still like to do some stability patches before full release, this was the last piece of game functionality I wanted to implement before submitting Shattered for full review from Apple.

I made that submission just a couple days ago and got a result back pretty quickly! 

Shattered has been approved for release on iOS!

This means I can now move forward with publicly announcing the TestFlight on ShatteredPixel.com and committing to a release schedule! Expect to see a blog post on ShatteredPixel.com soon with info about this.

New Screenshots

I’m working on some new storefront screenshots for Shattered as well! This is to coincide with the upcoming App Store release and also because Google Play has recently updated its own guidelines. In particular, both storefronts pretty unambiguously state that screenshots must be captured from actual gameplay. Google Play is also now heavily incentivizing all apps to have landscape screenshots.

While I’m fairly happy with the existing screenshots, they clearly are not captured from gameplay, and also aren’t in landscape! So, I’ve started testing a set of eight screenshots that fit those guidelines better.

Firstly, there are four landscape shots that each show gameplay at different stages of the game. From the warrior attacking a snake to the mage fireblasting Dwarf King.

Afterward there are four portrait screenshots that are a bit more interface focused, showing off inventory, talents, alchemy, and some colorful plants.

I started A/B testing these screenshots yesterday and will likely replace the current screenshots with them unless they perform substantially worse. I am sad to lose the call to action texts and the display of the hero splash arts, but those can both be reintroduced later. In particular I think the hero splashes would work well in a promo video, as that way all 4 of them can be shown while still only using raw game capture footage.

I'll also start looking to revamp Shattered's full description soon, which hasn't had a change in almost 5 years!