šŸŽ¼ Parse-O-Rhythm - Wishlist on Steam!

Wow this is awesome, and I like the plan! Yall go!

2 suggestions

  • If possible donā€™t spend money registering a company that wonā€™t make any money, you are likely to have to start paying frequently, and if there is no income, it will hurt development. Iā€™ve seen too many people do this mistake.
  • Please please consider posting these weekly short form devlogs in other social media (not just Flowlab forums or Flowlab related channels). I think this format will work really nice, and since you will be already writing a lot, you can just copy paste an gif/image and a phrase and share it with the world.
    Reddit is okay (I know you share there), but there are other social media channels you should look into for sure!

Best of luck to the entire team
Yā€™all indeed are cooking :fire:

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Thank you so much!!

To address the suggestions:

  • iirc, you donā€™t need to pay for anything to register a company in the US. Infact, you can get tax benefits from it (if youā€™re small). But I will definitely reconsider if money gets involved lol.
  • I would love to post these to other social media, however, no platforms I know of support this kind of paragraph + image based reporting. On most sites you can either just attach a single image or image bundle to a message (Discord, Reddit, X/Twitter) or you have to make a flat text or image post with lots of restrictions (Instagram). If I had a time wormhole I would definitely make dev logs on YouTube, but they are very time expensive to make so idk about it.

Thank you for the feedback! :slight_smile:

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Oh my gosh, what?

By the way, will the new maps be coming out soon? I canā€™t wait to play them!

Interesting. Could you send the link to get the game on Steam? -Please.

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The steam page isnā€™t up yet - update C will deliver a lot of very important visual changes, so I want to record footage and begin building the steam page AFTER the update. More details about it all will be shown in the roadmap :slight_smile:

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The steam version of Parse-O-Rhythm will be paid, right?
How much would it be?

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My current guess is $10. It will probably shift around though, but I canā€™t imagine going over $15 or under $5 with the scale of this project.

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I hope it becomes really successful :smile:
My wish for Flowlab is to see a game popular on Youtube that was made in Flowlab, since it would increase the popularity of the engine and do so many other positive things for the creator of said game and Grazer himself.

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Fun fact: one of my songs was made entirely on mobile.

It was painful.

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What?! You guys are Hardcore!

Thatā€™s amazing.

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2.2 ahh update

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ok but like, can update C include background changes? I feel like it could be a really cool aesthetic change, because sometimes when I play the game and an intense part of a song comes up, I really feel like the background, or any visual change could be made to signify that said part is difficult.

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that is actually the main change coming in update C - visuals and UI improvements. Iā€™m going to start work on them very, very soon, as the rebrand is almost 100% complete by this point!

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:construction: Sunday Devlog 2: Laying the Foundation

Hi again! This week has been very dusty, but now, with a solid foundation underneath, we have started building things as we prepare update C. Letā€™s talk about what happened this week!

Wrestling with systems

On the quest to rebrand, completing the rebranding on Google Play was a breeze. However, the same cannot be said for updating the trailers or navigating Appleā€™s systems.

Last week I had already made a new startup animation for the beautiful new logo. However, it was animated inside Flowlabā€™s programming. This meant I had to record the startup animation, crop it, and send it to the video. Simple, right? Well, something I hadnā€™t realized was that when anything used in an edited video, whether itā€™s a clip or an image, is edited at all, it becomes obsolete in the editor.

For example, if I put an image of a cat into a video editor, but then modified the image of the cat on a drawing program to draw a mustache on it, the image has now been altered and the video editor wonā€™t accept it anymore.

Fortunately, this had only affected the last few bits of the video. But it meant that in order to make a new video, before I even added the new logo, I had to take a chunk of the exported video, add it into the editor, and then precisely cut a point in the edited video to go from what was actually being altered in the editor to what was already exported. The cut ended up looking like this:


There were a bunch more layers and effects at the end, but they all got replaced by the export for this all to work.

Next was uploading the new trailers. I wasnā€™t able to just replace the trailers on YouTube, so I just updated the one on Steam. Steam is kind of weird in that, it will confirm youā€™ve uploaded something, but wonā€™t confirm when the change is ready to be published. Because closing Steamworks (the dev console for steam publishers) can risk losing edits youā€™ve been making, I had to keep the tab open on my computer without turning it off for nearly the entire day while the progress bar did absolutely nothing.


come onā€¦

But the worst thing, the thing that Iā€™m actually still grappling with as I simultaneously write this log, is Appleā€™s systems. Cue Lightning effects, evil laughter, and a pipe organ playing in the background

Before I even got to updating everything on Appleā€™s end, I got a notification on App Store Connect, the site that developers use to manage their app store presence, saying that I needed to confirm if Iā€™m a trader or not to comply with EU law and sell there.

Click for a "fun" fact similar to this event

Back when I launched GALACDRIVE to the app stores, Apple mentioned in an alert that I needed to run my app through the Chinese Communist Party in order to distribute in China. Google Play mentioned that my app needed to be verified by the DPRK to distribute in North Korea. Not a single other country was mentioned in these popups.

However, once I got to a certain point in the process, I kept landing on this loading screen that wouldnā€™t stop.


uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

After a lot of trying, I caved and wrote a support question on Appleā€™s community forum. It turned out that just using my apple laptop instead of my desktop worked.

Apple also wanted me to send a bunch of personal info to comply with the EU law, which I also sent. However, to actually change the developer name, I need to register an entire business behind Appleā€™s system. Part of this forces me to make a website, so you can expect an official website to show up on next weekā€™s log. I also need to create a business through ā€œDun & Bradstreetā€ a company that helps manage data for businesses and provides lots of analytics.

All in all, Iā€™m clueless as to why all this needs to be done on Appleā€™s end while Google Play just lets me change my name and sends me off. With all that aside, Iā€™m looking forward to making a website for Encabulated Games and sharing it for next week!

Meanwhile on the Discord serverā€¦

A poll was hosted earlier today to see if people wanted to add some fun, off-topic emotes to the server. People generally supported it in a landslide vote, and a chat channel for submissions is opening soon there.

image

However, more notably, one of the discord members, Toucan, submitted some suggestions to add a progress bar to show how much of a song is left, and a button to restart a track rather than going back to the menu. I think this is a very good idea and these ideas will definitely be added to update C. Suggestions matter!!

image

Parse-O-Rhythm

A LOT of thought has been put into how the new background, one of the main features of update C, will be assembled. One of the key parts of this is making something that scrolls at an angle. Fortunately, Iā€™ve already created some code using some annoying math to get that done, so with everything else mostly done, I can begin working on the new background!

ezgif-4-f2dcecb619

Youā€™ll notice that the rectangle looks a bit jittery when in motion. This is due to flowlabā€™s position behavior being unable to register decimals, leading to movement like this being chunky. Iā€™m confident this can be resolved by Grazer, however.

Thanks for reading this devlog! You can expect construction in Parse-O-Rhythm for some of the following days as new stuff is (finally) added, and Iā€™m looking forward to finally being done dealing with Apple soon!!

-Encabulated Games

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Iā€™m the same person as 1245780.

Is there a way that I can work with you? :saluting_face:

If he is inde he can chose if he wants a team

I donā€™t have inde. :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

But he does so he can make a team. But me no inde.:pleading_face:

Lets try to join a team.

Iā€™m already in a team.