Our upcoming remaster of "The Majesty of Colors" will be available on a bunch of devices: iOS and Android phones and tablets as well as Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs. We're excited to release on such a wide array of platforms, but it raises some development challenges!
The most basic challenge is how to test our game given our limited budget. We've managed to assemble a motley array of test devices. We develop in Windows, on desktop and Surface. We have a Mac Mini and an old laptop that's dual-booting Ubuntu. Melissa uses an Android phone and I use an old iPhone, and we can borrow tablets of various sorts from friends and colleagues. Together, these devices provide decent coverage of the platforms we want to support.
Thankfully, the hardest work of porting to multiple platforms is taken care of for us by Unity. It cross-compiles to just about every device under the sun. However, there are still some issues that crop up where it's not perfect.
One example is that certain devices have a lot of trouble with weird visual artifacts involving the super-chunky-pixel rendering process we're using. Our best guess is that it's occurring on devices with integrated graphics cards. With some tricky shader work and making sure to aim for integer pixel coordinates for rendering, we've cleared up the worst of the issues.
We continue to run into a bunch of little things to address. The Surface pen is only supported under certain circumstances. In order to release on the Windows Store, we (due to a series of odd constraints) need to change the way we're serializing save files and options data. To allow for a range of resolutions we're doing some finicky letterboxing and font scaling that will ensure that all players have a good play experience.
This is a bunch of work that sometimes requires juggling a few computers at once, but we hope it'll be worth it to our players when they're able to get the game on the device of their choice.
The remastered version of "The Majesty of Colors" will be released in mid-2017. For more information, see the website or our presskit.
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