DEVLOG // SALTLIGHT COVE
BLACK BOX
Devlog for Saltlight Cove, the cozy town-builder with no paywalls.
TRANSMITTING · 8 ENTRIES
The bug that was never an iPad bug
Thought bubbles kept vanishing on the iPad. The screen size had nothing to do with it.
Every bed and workshop in the cove floats a little thought bubble: what it is making, how far along it is, whether it is ready. They kept going missing on the iPad. On the phone they were fine.
READ →The houses that were supposed to be rocks
Two little stone cottages had been sitting in the sea for weeks. Nobody put them there.
The note said: "I don't get the house on the beach and in the ocean. Why are they there."
READ →The icons that only existed on my Mac
Six buttons rendered perfectly in every screenshot and were blank on the phone. The one that survived explained why.
The screenshot came in from the phone: the row of buttons along the bottom of the screen, six of them, and five were empty white circles. The sixth had a tick in it.
READ →The crop nobody could cook
Scallops looked right and read right. The economy audit found what playtesting would not have.
My wife asked for scallops. Fair request — it is a seaside town and there were mussels and oysters but no scallops. So in they went: level 6, four hours to grow, priced between the mussels and the oysters. Looked right. Read right.
READ →The splash screen that could never work
Every idea we had for the launch screen was impossible. So we stopped using it.
Our launch screen looked wrong and we knew why: a small square of artwork stranded in a field of flat colour. The obvious fix was to make it prettier. Add the title. Add a menu. Maybe a sign-in button.
READ →Ask for a sheaf, not a plant
Fifty-odd item icons, generated. The trick was describing the harvest, not the crop.
Saltlight Cove needs a picture for everything you can hold — ten crops, forty goods. Drawing fifty icons by hand is weeks. Generating them is an afternoon, if you can get the machine to make the right thing.
READ →The day touch stopped working
A bug that only existed on the phone, and the four wrong answers before the right one.
The report was three words: touch doesn't work. Not one button — nothing. On the phone only; fine on the desktop.
READ →Less reading, more pictures
The game played like a settings app wearing a farm. So we took the words out.
Every action had drifted into the same shape: tap a building, a sheet opens, read a list of sentences, tap the button on the right row. Correct, complete, and all writing.
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