OK, time to write a DevLog… But no idea what to write… Ok just write something about the game you are making!
Here goes:

“Banana hammock!”

This DevLog might not have been a great idea.
OK, let’s get serious here. I’m just gonna write a bit about what I even wanted to make in the first place when I started this “game”.
See, I wrote game in quotes because when I started developing it was meant just for some research. What I was researching, is how to make a casual, intuitive and easy to grasp game.

So I started by reading up on what types of game are most popular with casual players, and would you look at that, endless runners are right there at the top. It’s something about the constant trying to achieve more and positive reinforcement. Well, that’s simple enough, let’s make an endless runner then. And that’s how the first prototype was born. Just a simple 2D endless runner.

And then I found an article about different types of mobile game players, and of course, now that I want to link to it I can’t find it… Damn… Whatever.

Long story short, according to the article, make the controls simple, make the game in portrait mode and make it easy to learn, but difficult to master.
So combining all of that I added a nice little cat and dog sprites that I found online (now that link I found: https://www.gameart2d.com/cat-and-dog-free-sprites.html) and fiddled with the tap controls for about two days… Way too long, but I wanted it to be smooth, and the double jump gave me some problems.

When I got that working I added the swipe down for the quick land and swipe right to move forward. Turns out the swipe forward was a bad idea. Actually looking at it now even the swipe down is not as intuitive as I expected. Players just don’t seem to notice it. But I decided to leave the swipe down in the game since it should come in handy when implementing obstacles and pickups.

Well, that’s it for now and here’s a link to the video of a tester playing the game without info or tutorial. Thanks for that Nelson!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpB_3sjCBHA&feature=youtu.be

Cheers!