Finally it's happened to me - I've released version 1.0

With this new release, there is a new brand design - new logo, app icon and splash screen

I was not in love with the previous logo, aside from its look I feel it was trying to do too much and after living with it for a while it just did not fit in with what I want to do.

The new logo is clean with a bit of a retro touch and can jive well with many styles and themes I'd like to explore. I created several variants for different applications which I won't show yet. 

For the splash screen, I cleaned up the original illustration a lot. I don't have much time for this kind of work (this is still just a side hobby), so recycling any artwork I've done goes a long way. Anyway, the new image looks a lot better, but for the game I used a filtered version of it and it is always shown randomly cropped with moody animated lighting so every time you are greeted with a new composition with dramatic color combinations. I spent a lot of time choosing color combinations and programming so it is random, but also consistent. I'm really happy with it. 

Finally there is a new app icon. This was actually the hardest task even tho it's the simplest graphic. I went through too many concepts, colors and iterations, it was really insane. Even with the final icon i spent a lot of time adjusting the colors. Anyway here it is

I also did some adjustments to the song selection screen, most noticeable is the song list. I feel it is cleaner and makes more sense as it aligns with the song selection and also doesn't distract from the cover art. Also adjusted the animations a bit so it feels snappier. 

I did some refactoring, eliminated a memory leak and also fixed a few issues with OGG playback. There was also a crash that happened if you quit the app while in any list menu. It wasn't an issue because it happened when quitting the app but now rest assured that the app quits without crashing.

I cleaned up the menu bar a bit and added the option to start in full screen mode - I should have done that a long time ago. With that option, I also fixed an issue where when you first start the game, you can't move the window around till after you have resized it. This was a really annoying issue and can't believe I didn't fix it earlier. I also removed the title and the close button as there is no use for closing the window and keep the game running. 

To do:

With the new logo, it is going to inform design changes in the game. Because of my time constraints I'll focus on tweaking existing assets but the changes could be more significant time permitting. I have been testing some new backdrops for the gameplay, but I feel if i release those, I'll be getting further away from implementing customizable backdrops. 

There has been new updates to ffmpeg which might solve a malloc issue I have that can crash the games between switching songs. But the version of ffmpeg was modified by someone else and then further modified by me and I'm sure if I update it, I'll break a lot of things. but it is something to do

more stat displays. i've been dragging my feet on this one because it's not something I personally care for, but I do track all kinds of info I never display. I also want to add playlists and favorites.