It’s been a long time since my last development blog and for good reason. We’ve been hard at work going through beta testing, fixing and polishing Sentinel 4: Dark Star. We’re happy to say that it’s now finally completed and submitted to the iOS App Store!
The Journey
It was over two years ago when I first started to write down ideas and design what could be added to the already massive Sentinel 3 in order to warrant a sequel. During this time, the mobile market and the AppStore has come a long way, and the bar has been raised to lofty heights for what people expect from their modern mobile games. Sentinel 1: Mars Defence had a measly four maps and only a few types of tower. In comparison, Sentinel 4: Dark Star has more of everything: a massive 26-map campaign, vastly improved visuals and way more enemies, towers, weapons and gadgets than we’ve ever had before.
I’m very happy with the final result and we hope the public will enjoy it once it is finally available. It certainly was a long road for a core team of two people and I’m sure we’ve learned a lot from it.
Beta
As with a lot of betas, if sometimes feels as though you do half of the game in the last few weeks of development! It was pretty amazing how fast things got added, tweaked and polished during beta. We had some cool testers who were happy to play through the game several times each and came up with some great ideas. For me, trying to balance the amount of things in the game was a real challenge, especially now that the enemies can fight back and damage your defences. It’s no longer a simple act of spending on damage versus enemy’s health. We now have all sorts of ways to lose your defences, protect them and keep them active and working.
The first beta version was also without sound effects, unfinished graphics and no intro. All of these things really help to make it feel like a finished product and I’m glad we took to the time to get it all in there. People have been wanting the game for a long time now, and it has been tempting to just release it sooner. But in the end I am glad we spent the time and effort it required to make it as good as it could and should have been.
Campaign level 1 during development
Submission
So we have a finished game awaiting approval and a release date. Of course I’ve got millions of ideas for things to add, what we could have done differently, more quickly, what could do with some more polish. But that is just the nature of game development. I’m proud of what we have achieved, and I really can’t wait for it to be available to the public so that people can play our creation.
Rest assured as soon as we have any news from Apple and have a release date we will be telling the world about it. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way, and to all our fans who have been patiently waiting for it!
cheers,
Paul
