LMA2 Demo Postmortem

Hey all,

Whew! (takes deep breath). Now that the demo for LMA2 is out, I'm happy to report that all the work put in during October was well worth it! The demo is released and I learned alot.

Specifically, I learned alot about MOBILE BUILDS. The previous "Let's MEAT Adam" was for PC/Mac and I never thought I'd ever release a game on Android. There were so many unknowns in my mind, and tbh I wasn't even sure if it was well worth the effort.

• Do people even WANT to play visual novels on their phone?
• Do I want to put my game on the GooglePlay store?
• Should I attempt an iOS build, and if so how do I get it onto the Apple Store?
• How much censorship do I need to put on a game with explicit gore, sexuality and language? (for Android/IOS stores)
• How do I author or even package said builds?
• What are the requirements for having your mobile app on the Android/iOS store? (business bank account, agreements etc)

The good news, is it's good to have friends you can rely on. =) Specially very smart friends, much smarter than yourself, who are in the industry.

I reached out to a good friend and engineer who had done mobile game apps before. An epic Visual Novel Developer in his own right. He had sooo many insights. 

Here's what I learned:

• For  a game with alot of explicit adult content like gore, violence and sexuality...I opted to stay out of the official Android/iOS stores. Having to censor my indie game to that degree, just compromised our vision TOO much. Instead, I opted to host only an Android (APK file) on itch.io. 
• The only way to have a working iOS build that can install into one's iPhone, is to have it on the Apple Store.
• Even though RenPy can build Android builds, you still need (or someone else) to author it with a special "signature" of sorts. How I understood it, is that it's like an official author name like your stamp.
• Oof! Ugh! Responsive/Dynamic UI for mobile builds, that can adjust itself based on all the different android screen ratios. What a pain! We decided to letterbox the game for odd resolutions outside of 16:9. We also chose to not use responsive UI, but did go back and make certain buttons and icons bigger.

All in all, it was a great experience! I'm curious to see analytics through my itch.io Dashboard, in time...to see how well the APK build does in terms of downloads. If it's pretty popular, I guess I'll just have to do one for the full release too! =)