08/11/2026
Hi, Chris (aka Ninja Pirate Robot Alien) here, giving you an updated pulse reading on my first solo independent release, Sackjack Island.
The most important change: I’m targeting mobile platforms, so the app is now going straight to phones. The battle scene has been reformatted to allow for fixed power-up buttons instead of dealt-card power-ups, and the UI is semi-functional—enough for playtesting. Which is kind of where the battle scene is at right now.
I’m currently working on quick UI animations (tweens, flashes, sounds), and will soon release the game to friends and family to try out the tournament and battle flow.
Shifting the visual components around and reformatting the game to portrait 9:16 created a bunch of overhead. Along with a complete visual overhaul, I realized I was avoiding certain things: thinking through the save/persistence scripts and how to track persistent data; planning out the source assets a little better by using better compression, like WebP rather than PNG for everything, and using atlases in place of single-unit files; and rebuilding a bug-free scene and resource loader. Things which I have been working on and almost ready to be added to the current setup. Excited.
Let me know if you wanna try the game out soon (3-4 weeks from now), shoot me a message
