karwosts

Can the aspect ratio of an image be preserved when presenting it as the Image of the Day?

Looking at the image for today, it's a phone image (long and narrow), but it gets squished down into a landscape picture, making it look awful.

I'll admit I have an interest in this as I've also recently submitted an image that does not fit that ratio, but it seems like something that could be really easily fixed. The images are displayed fine in the gallery, but on the homepage they are really distorted.

 iotd.png   304.29K   21 downloads

So after several months of coding and designing in my spare time, I've finally finished my first mobile game for Android and put it up on the android market. I'm really proud of my work and I learned a lot from doing it, so at this point I don't have any regrets regardless of what happens next.

However after the first week has come and gone, I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed. All my friends and family has finished trying it out, all my promotional posts have slipped from the front page of their respective forums into obscurity, and now all I'm left with is silence and the faint sound of crickets. Haven't had any downloads in two days, and I've been watching a big "0 active users" for the last several hours on my analytics page.

I always knew this day would come, though I didn't expect it to be quite this desolate. I knew I wasn't going to have a million players, though I thought that somehow I'd end up with at least a slow trickle of downloads wandering in from the corners of the android market. I guess I was wrong, as I'm now discovering.

Just curious for anyone else out there who has been in my position, what happened after you released your small indie game? Was there any promotion that you did that you found to be effective in any way (big word of mouth network, advertising, promotion in any particular store/forum/network)? How did you find your first few hundred players, if you ever got that many?

Or did you just abandon your game, write it off as a learning experience and move on to other pursuits?

Would love to hear some experiences of other developers who have been there, even if the conclusions are not particularly inspiring
Thanks for reading!

This is a screenshot of my recently completed Android game, Electron Flux. Its a puzzle game where the player designs a machine to process electrons and generate a power quota. This is achieved with arrows, switches, lasers, and other tiles. Includes an online leaderboard to compare and rank your solutions against other submitted scores.

This is the first game project I've completed as a hobby developer, and I've had a really fun time writing it.

The game is available for free on Google Play for Android: https://play.google....ts.ElectronFlux

Click here to view the iotd

After several years of hanging around here I'm finally releasing my first finished product, I would be honored if anyone would try it and let me know what you think (reviews appreciated too!)

It's called "Electron Flux" and it's a puzzle game for Android where the player has to design machines to route and energize electrons to meet the level quota. This is done with arrows, switches, lasers, and other contraptions. It's got 24 levels and a great original soundtrack.

Trailer Video:


Some screenshots:

 title.png   122.72K   8 downloads  pic1.png   137.46K   10 downloads  pic4.png   136.56K   8 downloads
 pic2.png   139.97K   9 downloads  pic3.png   143.04K   8 downloads  pic5.png   148.22K   13 downloads

Thanks for reading!