September 26, 2015 -- Weekly Update

Hey all, it's about time we started posting with regularity. So, we are starting a weekly update post to inform you of what has been happening with Zen Balance this week!

This was a bit of an uneventful week for feature adding, but what we did add are huge improvements. We implemented Unity Ads into our humble little game, and got them working to our specifications, (a post about our ad theory, and monetization of Zen Balance will be coming next week,) and we fiddled with a couple of the animations in the game, (specifically the game end animation.)

Remember to check out our video post to see what Zen Balance is starting to look like as we enter the final phases of development. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, drop us a line in the comments below, and look to us next week for a formalized release date!

Thanks for reading, as always,

austin

Zen Balance Videos

Hey all, I wanted to take a quick second to make a post of all the videos that Matt and I have shared back and forth while working on Zen Balance. Check out the videos before, or just check out the playlist on YouTube.

September 25, 2015

What will most likely be the end game animation moving forward. Yay gravity!

Just a short preview of our current game over menu. This will probably go through some iterations.

September 21, 2015

A short video showing off our redesigned main menu for Zen Balance.

September 17, 2015

One of our main menu candidates that we decided against, think differently? Let us know! 

Ooops!

One of our main menu candidates that we decided against. Think differently? Let us know.

Jus the slide in of the main menu.

A short clip of the count in animation.

A short preview of our first draft of the Game Over popup.

A quick preview of our working main menu animation.

Zen Balance in iOS Alpha

Hey all!  

We are super excited to let you all know that Zen balance is entering its first round of alpha testing! Which brings me to the point: if you're interested in helping us out with this process, shoot an email to dev@symbioticstudios.net.

if this is the first you're hearing about Zen Balance, please check out our announcement post, here.

Happy gaming.

austin

v1.0.3

So with v1.0.2 we had a couple lines of code commented out (oops) that are essential to the progression of Block'd. For those of you who have downloaded Block'd since yesterday, or will go download Block'd within the next week or so, will find that all 30 levels are unlocked and playable.

We fixed this problem right away, and it has been submitted and uploaded to Apple as v1.0.3, but as anybody who has worked with Apple will know, it'll be about a week or so until that goes live.

We hope you all take advantage of this time to get acquainted with some of the more difficult levels, and practice them! v1.1 will bring more reasons to have those levels down pat, so get to know them, and get to know them well.

With all that being said, this weekend we will be sharing a good bit of information about what we plan to have coming in v1.1, so stay tuned if that sort of information interests you.

Austin

Website Update

Taking a step back from Block'd for a moment, I wanted to give you all a quick idea of what direction we're about to take our website in. When we first switched to Squarespace over just a simple blog, we had the idea that we would like to create a bit of web presence for Matt and myself as individuals instead of just as parts of a larger picture. After several months we have decided that this is no longer the best way to go about establishing ourselves.

The first reason that comes to mind is that our content is spread thin on the website, trying to decide what things actually belong in which blogs. The other reason we have made this decision is that we are sure that there are better ways to branch out on this monster that is the internet and bring new viewers in from different areas.

Over the next week or so, we will be slowly moving any development related content out of our individual blogs and into the blog I'm writing on now. During that process we will get a better tag and category hierarchy setup so that it is easier to find the content that interests you when you'd like to see it.

That's all the news for now, keep an eye out for Block'd v1.0.2 and another eye out for information relating to v1.1. Matt and I are actively debating what features we would like to move forward with, as soon as we have that solidified we will be updating you with what's coming.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Austin