Hey!

After over two years of development, completely in my free time, I have finally released my game onto iOS and Android. The release has gone pretty well so far, with the game being featured by Apple on the app store in a whole bunch of different regions!

Gravity Galaxy on the App Store

Gravity Galaxy on Google Play

I thought 64D might be interested in a quick look at some of the different stages of development the game went through before being released:

The original prototype was made right before I had to move out of my student house, in about a week of pretty much working on the game non stop until like 6am every day. At the end of the week I had made a prototype that looked like this:

Once this was made I got a job and moved to London and pretty much forgot about the game entirely for quite a few months. At some point during this period as an attempt to get things going again I started playing around a little with procedurally generating planets to be used for the graphics in the game. The furthest I got with this idea spat out planets that looked like this:

If you are interested in how this worked you can read more about it here. These graphics didn't really seem like they could really be used with the game, so yet again I sort of just forgot about the game completely for quite some time.

At some point later, when speaking to a friend from uni, he said something like "oh yea, I said I was going to make some graphics for that game you showed me" and a little while later sent me this mock up:

Pretty much instantly it was decided that is how we should try and make the game look. From that point onward we began working together fairly frequently, at least once a week or so on the game.

At the time, I remember thinking this looked really good..We continued working on the game slowly on and off for awhile, updating things from the original prototype with new art.

Eventually we had created a build that somewhat resembled an actual game:

Around this time things shifted a bit from 'just pissing about in our free time' to 'we should actually release this game'. With that goal in mind, it became pretty obvious we couldn't really release the game with the graphics how they were. The game used quite a few lights and loads of transparency. This caused the game to run very hot on phones and caused low FPS on older devices. So we started redefining the graphic style to something more mobile friendly.

Doesn't actually look to far off the finished game here! We took this art style change as an opportunity to try and explore some alternatives to how we represented gravity, including one really crazy way that just didn't work out.

We spent some time updating everything to the new graphic style, and further developing the game, until one day we came across an application for mobile games to receive funding for development. We decided to put together a video and apply for the funding, although we weren't very hopeful.

To our surprise we were successful! Things got a lot more serious at this point, although visually the changes weren't as drastic. After receiving the funding we spent another year developing the game, working on things related to monitisation, level creation and all the million small things you never notice until you need to finish a game (such as juicyness!). We now had to commit to working on the game pretty much every night, as we were both still working full time jobs at other game studios, but had deadlines we had to meet for the funding. To make things a bit harder, the studio I worked at was in "crunch" for about 6-7 months, so I would have to work 11-12 hour days several nights a week, then come home and find a few more hours to work on Gravity Galaxy. Also, my lung decided to collapse 3 times during this period, hospitalizing me for a few weeks and evenutally requiring me to have lung surgery!

But some how, no one died and we finished the game!