Hey guys,
you won't believe it – but up until now, I've never had a complete Starling-powered game in the App Store myself. For years, I only focused on Starling or assisted others complete theirs.
So, sometime this year, I decided I must finally create a small game start-to-finish and publish it in the App- and Play Store myself. And that game is now finally available (at least on the App Store; Google Play will follow in January).
It's a small "spot-the-difference" kind of game, and I freely admit that it's not terribly innovative. 😄 The plan was to pick a simple genre and polish the game as much as possible. Click on the images below to see a quick video that shows it in action:
The idea is that while playing the "spot-the-difference" game, you collect rings; and with those rings, you can then purchase new photos, until you fill up your complete album.
To make this work, I also created a small editor that allowed me to easily mark the actual differences. Built with Starling, too, of course! Here's how that looks like:
Since I always show the images full-screen when you're playing, I had to make sure the images work with all kinds of aspect ratios. Thus, the editor also allows to pick a safe area, etc. I actually overdid it a little, adding stuff like undo and redo and so forth. 😉
The output is then resized for different device resolutions, compressed with ATF and sent to the Gamua server, from which the game loads them at runtime.
As for the game itself, it's mostly pure Starling, with help from Feathers for the scrolling lists, etc. To integrate with GameCenter et al, I used the great ANEs from Distriqt.
Sounds were mostly taken from SoundSnap; the background music from the menu is from Eric Matyas' SoundImage collection.
The images were all taken from Unsplash.com, and I found a great photo editor on Upwork.com to create most of the image differences (over 2200 for 220 images!).
If anyone wants to give it a shot, here's the App Store Link: [EDIT 2019/02: plus Play Store Link]
I'd be happy about any feedback! If anyone has questions about a particular implementation detail, feel free to ask away, too.
BTW, if anyone wondered why there was no more Starling release in December – that game is partly responsible for that. Sorry! 😳 I promise a new version will be out early 2019. The game showed me a few areas where I can make important improvements – that was actually one of the main motivations to create it, after all!
So stay tuned. 🙂
Until then: all the best wishes to all of you! Merry Christmas to an awesome community!