My Baseball League - Launched!

We're delighted to announce that we've launched our second game on itch.io (and fourth overall) - My Baseball League! We've done a few things slightly differently from our last game, Village Cricket, so thought a devlog might be good place to write them down. We'd love to hear any comments anyone has about the game or how we went about making it.

Plan
We'd spent just under a year working on Village Cricket in our spare time, so thought we could re-use some of the work we'd done and convert it over to baseball (much more popular than cricket in North America, obviously!) and get another game out in a good timeframe. We started working on My Baseball League at the end of November 2018 with a target of getting it ready in time for the start of the baseball season in last March 2019; and we just about managed that.

Coding
Whilst we could re-use a lot of our existing code we knew there would be some key areas that needed to change: how the match and scoring would work, and for the Android/iOS versions we wanted to display adverts and allow players to make an in-app purchase to disable them. The match/scoring changes turned out to be the bulk of the work, and we iterated this over a two or three month period with many changes to how the scoreboards were displayed to try and make things as clear as possible for players. 

Unity 2018's built-in advertising and IAP functionality made displaying adverts and paying to remove them sound quite straightforward, but we spent at least a week over the Christmas holidays banging our heads on our keyboards when nothing worked; which turned out to be the entire setup failing to initialize on boot... Live debugging on a connected device wasn't something we'd ever had to do before, but two days of figuring out how that worked and fiddling around with it solved the problem. Adverts and IAP aren't present in the itch.io version of the game, we decided to go with 'Free/Donation' instead.

Art
We didn't have a proper artist available to make any new assets for us this time around (he'd done great work for us on Village Cricket), so we knew we had to re-use as much as possible and then create anything else we needed in his style (but with none of his skill). We ended up using free stock images from pixabay.com and modifying/distressing them as best we could; overall the results have been OK.

Audio
We ended up implementing the best audio we've ever had in one of our games! We hadn't exactly set a high benchmark before, but for using free stock audio snippets we're really happy with how the crowd cheering and booing blends together.  

Localisation
We implemented multiple languages for the first time, thankfully Lean Localisation (free from the Unity Asset Store) made this really simple. We did use Google Translate for everything so aren't sure that all the translations make perfect sense, but hopefully they are enough for players to understand what is going on. 

We're sure you've probably had enough reading for now so we'll stop typing; we really hope you enjoy playing the game!