June was spent almost entirely on getting Caramel to its final state.
After everything I implemented, I still thought the game felt too primitive, so I started by adding one more little game mechanic. Over time, clutter accumulates in warehouses. The bigger the mess, the longer it takes to get resources from and to the warehouse. The player can order a cleanup, but the warehouse is not operational during this process. Clutter accumulates very slowly and only requires attention about once every 5 minutes. So it has a pretty minor effect on gameplay, but I still think it's better this way.
After that I started thinking about what easter egg to add to the end of the campaign. Nothing good came to mind, but I remembered how in bleentoro I made a full mini game (that very few people saw) at the end of the campaign. I played clustertruck a couple years ago and ever since then I wanted to do something similar. Anyway, I decided to make a mini game based on the same idea as clustertruck (inside the chaos you jump from thing to thing). I got a bit carried away and spent a bit more time on it than I planned, but I think it turned out pretty good.
I spent another week or so optimizing the game. I had optimized the game before, but I still had to spend more effort to make it work properly on a smartphone. I'm happy with the result, but I have to admit that with a large number of buildings (about a thousand) fps still drops when camera is zoomed out and there is nothing you can do about it. Also, it was not possible to completely defeat the leakage of video memory, so if you play for a very long time, the game can hang at the stage of loading the level.
It took about a week to create the tutorial levels. Ideally, tutorials shouldn't immediately dump a huge amount of information on a novice player. But there are quite a lot of game mechanics and non-obvious nuances in the game. So it was quite a challenge to shape the tutorial in a way that would gradually and smoothly teach the player how to play the game. Plus, the training messages had to be short, concise, clear and informative, which meant that each such message had to be well thought out.
I've spent the last couple days playtesting the game. I plan to spend few more days on it. After that, I'll get to work on preparing updates for all my games. My games have a one-time message about a new game being released (right now the newest game is drevepsina). I will replace it with a Caramel release message and post those updates immediately after the game release. There won't be any big features in those updates, but there are a lot of games (and iOS), so it will take a couple weeks (maybe less) to get it done.
Usually after a game is released, I move on to the development of the next game almost immediately. But right now I'll have to spend a couple months dealing with the google play bureaucracy. After that I will resume development of toocha.