Personal Observations/Progress
- This week I wanted to tackle the logo design, graphic design and promo art for my project. I knew this would take a while, as this is one of the most important parts of any app. I probably spent two days or more working on various logo and background combos until I finally had about 4 different variants that I liked. However, I couldn't decide which direction I wanted to pursue, so similar to what I've done in the past, I posted my two favorite promos on my facebook wall and asked my friends to vote! This was really helpful and I was actually very surprised with how "one-sided" the response was. In fact, I was leaning in the opposite direction! The two promo variants were logo on a sunset background and logo on a tree lined background -- sunset won by a landslide!
Production Progress
Task: Create Promo Artwork and Graphics
As I mentioned above, I spent a couple of days working on my promo artwork and logo. Overall, I'm satisfied with what I have, but will likely push it a bit further. I now realize that I need to create a hero image/character which is a little tricky at this stage. I don't want to reveal the angels initially but it would make sense to have some representation of them. For now, I'm good with what I have and will think about generating more promo artwork down the road.
Task: Integrate Entitlement Check
The most important thing I had left to do was integrate the required entitlement check into my project. This turned out to be trickier than I expected. In my initial review of the Oculus documentation, the integrate seemed to be straightforward. I assumed that I would simply create a script and add the entitlement initialization line with my app id, however upon a closer review, I realized that the Oculus documentation didn't actually tell you WHAT to do once the entitlement is called. In short, you need to figure out how to handle a legit request versus a bad/false request. Fortunately, I found a good thread on the Oculus developer boards which provided a script template that worked like a charm for me. I made two different builds (one with a bad appID and one with my actual appID) and tested the entitlement function. It worked and I was done!
Task: Upload First Build
After integrating the entitlement check and creating my promo artwork, I finally got around to uploading my first build to the Oculus developer dashboard. The publishing process was fairly straightforward and very similar to the Apple App Store submission process. (I'd guess there are some former Apple employees at Facebook/Oculus which would explain it ;-) I uploaded a build to the Alpha channel and will upload my final build to the BETA channel tonight. Depending on the final submission instructions for the OLP program, I should be done!