Well it's been a busy couple of days of development. Technically my streak is broken because I didn't make a submission. In my defense I was attending my birthday party and ran out of time to post. That is not to say I didn't do any coding, just that I didn't make it to a computer to post in time.

UI & Game-play

Yesterday I visited one of the most dangerous places for my wallet... the Unity Asset store. There I picked up two assets, Rewired and Toon Shader Mobile. Rewired gives me the needed level of input support, including rebinding of controls inside the game and hot plugging of game pads on PC. It has nice tools for setting up mappings and profiles as well. This will allow me to ditch the Unity Launcher and handle all options for the game inside the game.

I successfully built a prototype UI with controller support, giving me a main menu for the game. I also wired the game pads up to the character in game, and the characters can now be controlled one or two players with any combination of multiple game-pads and shared keyboard controls.

Today I went back to working on the core game-play elements for the gem slinging.

Models

I can't claim credit for this part of the streak, other than the fact I assisted in getting these models functioning in game. That's enough for me to feel justified in including this here and attaching the nifty screenshot.

For PuzzleMon I am collaborating with one other person. We both work on game design, I do the coding and she produces the artwork. Anything that looks like programmer art is mine, anything that looks professional is hers. In previous screenshot I threw random particle textures onto the model to make them something other than flat gray. No longer! The first stage of textures have been handed over, and while these is still a lot of detail to be added they look much much better.

The streak is on again, and hopefully I won't break it for a while.

Taking a break from figuring out networking to work on a generic character controller that will function with both the online and the offline code.

Eventually I'll figure out how to get multiple clients to sync game states over a network.

As expected today has been taken up mostly with project planning with my collaborator and artist on this project. We've set up a couple of Trello boards to support this project, and I'm in the process of writing up some Tumblr blog posts.

Tomorrow should be back to coding, and I will try and figure out the best way to structure the project to deal with lag.

Just so this isn't yet another boring text post, some of the concept art that was made for the game.

So the advantage of being Australian seems to be that I get the first streak entry each day :)

Implemented gems into the game. I'm able to set the gem to the correct graphic and push them down the board (warping at the moment, animation will come in a bit later). This implantation is local only, and pushing them onto the board is very hackey. This was more a test that the gems could be set to the proper graphic.

Next will be a robust algorithm for generating gems on the board, both offline and in the network. The requirement is that the gems are random, and that four gems aren't generated in a group (as this is the gem clear condition).

After that has been implemented it will be time to get the avatar at the bottom of the screen actually interacting with the board. I'm hoping to have that done by the end of next weekend.

No coding tomorrow, but I won't be breaking the streak. I'll be sitting down with the artist that I'm collaborating with and start to put together some of the UI elements. I'll also write a blog post about my progress (probably using my Streak posts as a basis) and hopefully be creating a Trello board for this project so we can track elements of it better.

We've just hit the working week and suddenly the time I have available to code goes right down!

An offline options have been added to the game. This will allow single player and local multiplayer matches to be played offline either on one keyboard or with one or more controllers (controller support yet to be added).

Coming up tomorrow: I start to implement the actual game play.

So as my last brief entries highlighted I've been busy learning Game networking using the Photon Cloud solution for the competitive puzzle game that we are developing. Today I integrated the first bit of actual code, and have the player movement synced between the two players. Even better, I was able to build it and look at it on my Vita (I'm using unity and the PSM Sony development program).

The screenshot below is taken from the Unity editor, but the pink board is for a player networking from my Vita.

The creatures in the board are render to textures (something else I learned how to implement this weekend) and will act as cheer squad for the players. There isn't a texture ready for them yet so I just dumped one of the included particle textures on them to give them some form.

This week will see the implementation of actual game-play as well as investigation about how I can include local game in offline mode but still reuse code that I wrote for the networked version.

A day learning about RPC calls and player management in the Photon Cloud networking environment.

Perhaps tomorrow some networked game-play