I've not had a chance to post development updates the last couple of weeks because i've been busy, I have a small list of things to work through before I put out a Demo, Trailer and Greenlight campaign.
Primarily I have been working on getting the UI up to date with the new style and removing all the programmer art, it's an ongoing process and there's still lots to do. Part of that is connecting up the functionality for the Mass Effect style encyclopaedia that reveals background details about the setting as the player explores and the Contact screen which holds all the details you know about the NPC's you meet as you find out about them.
I've also been writing and implementing dialogue for some of the NPC's, I hate writing the dialogue because I know how important it is and I don't have a clue what I'm doing. I had initially planned to have a relatively small selection of dialogue options and present them all to the player all the time, rather than having them tunnel through a tree, but this approach means you need to be quite careful about constraining the conversation too much and not getting to flesh out the characters enough. I'm still going to persevere with this approach as I don't think 'exploring' a dialogue tree is very fun, but if it turns out later that I need a lot more dialogue than can comfortably exist in one menu, I might switch.
The other thing I've been working on is Google Analytics implementation in C++ using Microsofts Open Source Cross Platform C++ REST API. I've already uploaded the Google Analytics code to GitHub because I think it might be valuable and it's small and clean. I intend to flesh it out further as time goes by, currently it only supports Events. Analytics is something in mobile we take for granted and is invaluable for measuring all sorts of aspects of where our game is failing the players. Most big studios have their own Analytics solution for their games but Google Analytics is fine for my needs and will help me learn more about how people play my game in the absence of any kind of testers.
