Finishing Up the Scrolling Shooter

I've been finishing up some last details with my arcade scrolling shooter. My brother has been play testing it and we've been tweaking the difficulty of things and adding some gameplay changes that were needed. Nothing major, but collectively a lot of changes. One thing I did add that is significant is a new game mode that is unlocked once the player unlocks all the normal levels. This new mode is kind of a gauntlet that pits the player against enemies from all the levels all together, one after another. I think it's pretty fun.

One thing I still want to do is to add a simple text area on the level select screen that gives the players general tips and suggestions about how to play the game. I'm going to try to thing of some tips and then throw them all in a string file, then randomly grab one from there and use it to populate the text when the level select screen is created.

Additionally, I'm excited to get working on the in app billing for the game. This will be the first game that I've done that has just a single version. My previous games and apps have had a Lite version and a Full version. I'm working on getting Google's in app billing to work where the game comes with 2 or 3 levels initially and then the user can purchase the rest. This is something I've wanted to work on for quite a while, but due to some weird restrictions with Google play, I can't test in app purchasing with my developer account and I cant change the account that's tied to my phone without doing a factory reset, which I've been unwilling to do. The reason I'm excited now is that I recently got a new phone and so my old phone has just become a test device. I haven't done the factory reset on it yet, but once I am sure that all my content there is backed up, I'm going to reset it and set it up with a test account email and then I will be able to get things finalized. I tested the purchasing with my brother's phone and it successfully allows you to buy the full version, but right now that doesn't actually do anything because I haven't actually coded in any level restrictions based on the state of the player's purchases. It's not something I'm worried about though. Shouldn't take too long to get things set up how I want them once I get around to it. Things are looking good for the game but now I need to start looking for an artist to come on board and help me out with making things look good.