Yes! Oh My Shape! is only three weeks old and it is already receiving its first major update.

I would dare to say that our small roadmap is being fulfilled.

Let’s recall the roadmap that I outlined in the last post about Oh My Shape!

[September & October]

• Translation into Spanish (since it is the most downloaded country)
• An options panel to:
  • Change the language
  • Be able to manage the volume of the music
  • Be able to manage the volume of the sound effects
• Push notification system
• Dynamic tutorials. We will remove the mega text tutorial that no one reads and add images and gifs to indicate how to play.

And yes, this update contains all of that.

Translations, volumes and options panel

All the content has been translated from English to Spanish since Spain was and remains the country that downloads the game the most. To achieve this, I used this free plugin: Lean Localization.

Easy to use, with very clear documentation and idiot-proof integration to translate text objects, text in our scripts, objects, and sprites. It even comes with “auto-translation” that uses the Google Translate API but… you can’t trust it completely.

Once everything was translated, it was time to create an options panel. A little UI work and we had it, we added two sliders and a dropdown, and now we have the controls for music volume, sound effects volume, and language change.

For volume control, I simply modify the value of the AudioSource from 0 to 1. And since I have an AudioSource in the Camera for the music and an AudioSource in a main object for the rest of the sound effects, it is easy to read the slider value and apply it.

With the translations, I also added some code to detect the device’s language, so that it appears in Spanish if you have it set that way.

A small problem with the translations was that the phrases in English are shorter and when seeing the translated version, they went out of bounds and there were misaligned texts. The solution was simple, making some adjustments to positioning and sizes.

New tutorials

The tutorials took a bit more work. The idea was to have less text, more images, and especially animations of the gestures that need to be made for each action.

They have turned out quite well (I think) and another positive is that instead of being a gigantic tutorial at the beginning, they are divided into 3 parts. The first tutorial appears as soon as you start playing and explains the basic concepts and movement.

The second tutorial appears when you buy your first upgrade and explains how to differentiate whether the shape has powers or not, whether they are active or not, and how swiping your finger up activates them.

The third and last tutorial appears when you unlock the next shape. Similarly, it indicates how you can change between shapes. I hope that new users can adapt much sooner to the mechanics with these tutorials.

Push notifications

This might seem like it doesn’t add anything for the player, and to some extent it is true, it is more for me, to encourage the game to be visited again.

I have not added many notifications, I do not intend to turn Oh My Shape! into hell. Simply a reminder that you can come in to play 😁.

And that’s all. It is a great update with many improvements in terms of quality and to make the player’s journey through Oh My Shape! more comfortable.

Next steps and milestones

If all goes well and we keep to the schedule, the next update, which will be epic, will happen in November and will contain the following:

• Endless mode. A game mode only playable when you have passed the 15 levels and that will allow you to compete with players from all over the world to see who has the best score.
• Integration with Google Play Services that includes:
  • Achievements, so the player has more reasons to play and perform certain actions in the game.
  • Leaderboard to display the ranking of the best scores in Endless mode.

November might seem far away, but it is not, and remember that along the way I am doing a thousand things:

• Learning Unreal Engine
• Learning Blender (I want to create my own models and assets, crazy me)
• My virtual reality game to finish the Unity VR development pathway
• Managing the blog (and creating a better contact page 😅)
• Cooking up the YouTube channel

More info soon!