Yay!! We've signed with a publisher, Back to Basics Gaming, to handle the marketing and PR for Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant, as well as our future titles.

Very excited, check out the blog post: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.co.za/2015/09/heres-to-great-partnership-with-back-to-basics-gaming.html

We develop in Unity, but that doesn't mean we don't have interest in the other awesome engines out there! Last week, the awesome devs that made Infinity Blade released a bunch of assets for that game for FREE on the Unreal Marketplace.

I blogged about it, because it's an awesome bunch of stuff!

Check it out here: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.co.za/2015/09/massive-free-collection-of-assets-for.html

The last week was a really good one for game development! We made excellent progress on Catch a Falling Star, and as always learned a lot :)

We modified the way we do baskets quite a lot, which will make adding new ones much easier in the future, plus give us a bit more free reign when it comes to designing them.

Also, I added a moon to the menu page. Just a small little something to make it prettier :)

And lastly, a brand new game play video!

Check out the blog post here: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.co.za/2015/09/some-progress-for-catch-falling-star.html

That's right! Our game, Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant is featured with 11 other great indie titles in the latest IndieGala bundle (which you can get here).

In our latest blog post, I mention that: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/08/star-chronicles-delta-quadrant-on-indiegala.html

Thanks for your support!

This week, we updated Delta Quadrant to version 1.25. We added a few features based on the feedback from our players.

Read the blog post about it here: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/08/star-chronicles-delta-quadrant-update.html

As I'm working more and more with Unity, I learn about all kinds of interesting anomalies as well. For example, the UI for Unity includes an Input Field. And as any good input box should be, there's a caret - the blinking thing showing you where you're going to type next. But in Unity's Input Field, the caret is sadly glitched, and you need to tweak the hell out of it to get it to work properly.

Now, in my latest blog post I talked about said tweaking, but it's still not enough. It's a start, however, so if you're also having fun with that damn caret, then read here: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/08/those-damn-carets-unitys-input-field-field-caret-position-wrong.html

The next caret related issue I must work on is why they simply disappear sometimes and not other times. Getting ready for another killer caret week!

The last few days of development for Catch a Falling Star didn't yield too many visible results - most of it was in the background of the game's functionality. Luckily, we do have two new theme concepts to show off, thanks to the super talented Natalie from Sugar+Spice Design.

Check out the concepts on our latest blog post: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/08/two-more-themes-for-catch-falling-star.html

This was a great week for Catch a Falling Star development. From the start of the project we decided that we want to add localization to the game - that is, have it be available in various languages. This week, Jayson added the functionality for that, and it's a grand system indeed! Adding new languages will be extremely simple and easy in the future!

Then, the game will have a simple economy in-game. As you play can earn our in-game currency (which we've unofficially dubbed Star Bux, although nowhere in the game will this title be shown), with which you can purchase additional cosmetic items like more baskets and more themes.

One option was to store these values locally, but this then immediately opens up the game to allow cheating in some way. So we've decided to find a service that will allow us to store values like these online somewhere. Our search led us to PlayFab, and boy are we glad we found them!

Anyway, read all about it in our latest blog post: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/08/progress-for-catch-falling-star-storing-player-data.html

It's totally out of character for me to get a new version of Windows the moment it's released. But this time I decided to go for it, and see what happens.

I must say, I'm pleasantly surprised. Except for the automatic updates messing with my graphics drivers, and port 80 issues for Apache, everything is working great so far!

Check out my blog post about it here: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/07/upgraded-to-windows-10-today.html

The most important part, all my programs just work. No need to reinstall anything, so I'm super happy about that!

We live in South Africa, and with that we face many challenges people from first world countries don't (at least that's what I think). We have a rather incompetent government, and with that comes things like internet struggles, and for about a year now, load shedding.

My latest blog post talks about the fun we're having with these things.

http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-daily-struggles-of-being-south-african-indie-game-developer.html

I conclude the post with a mention of my little side project called Pass-along-poker - a very simple mobile game to help speed up the time when the load shedding hits. It can also be played as a nice little drinking game perhaps if you're a bunch of friends :)

Anyway, until next time!

Our first game, Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant, has finally been released on Steam! In our latest blog post, I talked about what a ride it's been: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/07/delta-quadrant-finally-on-steam-our.html

We learned a lot from the whole experience, and I hope you can find something of use in our post as well.

Till next week!

The main platform you want your game on is obviously Steam, and to do that, you first need to get through the Greenlight process. For Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant I thought it was going to take us a year or more, but we did it in 46 days.

In our latest blog post, I explained just what we did to speed up the process - maybe it's something that can help you as well!

Read our latest post here: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-we-got-delta-quadrant-greenlit-on-steam.html

Last week wasn't a very big game dev one. We mainly focused on getting Delta Quadrant Steam-ready, and the first hurdle we faced was updating it to Unity 5. We tried doing that a few month ago, but one of our main assets hasn't been updated to version 5 yet, so it would basically have meant we have to rewrite the whole UI for the game. Luckily, at the beginning of June the asset was finally updated, and the upgrade to Unity 5 went a lot smoother thank goodness.

As for Catch a Falling Star, not much game development went on, but I did mange to update our landing page for it - check it out here: http://www.catchafallingstargame.com/

And, here's the blog post :)

Sadly, last week wasn't the most productive. I had these huge plans to do a full day game dev session last Tuesday, but then the heavens opened up and left us with fighting off the water inside our house the whole day. The guys are working on our roof, and the gutters to one section wasn't done yet, hence the flooding INSIDE the house. Anyway, I now laugh about it, but believe me, all the soap in the world couldn't cleanse the nasty language I managed to spew forth on the day!

I did manage to get some stuff done, just not as much as I had hoped - in Catch a Falling Star, to make things a bit more customizable for our players, you can unlock different baskets to catch the stars with as you play. There will be more than 20 with our first release, and we plan on adding lots more! You earn coins (which we're thinking of calling Star Bux haha!) with which you can unlock a random basket (one you haven't unlocked yet of course). I decided to do this unlocking part with a simple animation - a small popup pops up and the animation runs randomly through the yet-to-be-unlocked baskets, finally stopping on the new one you've just unlocked.

I made a very short video of it in action - it's not fully implemented just yet, but the animation is in and it looks great!

Check out the blog post/progress report here: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/06/catch-falling-star-progress-report-the-unlock-basket-button.html

I didn't get to do too much over the last week unfortunately. The one day I set aside for a full on game dev day just didn't work out. We had a bit of a flash flood, and I took it as a bad sign when water was spurting out of the power outlet I use for my PC... A interesting day it turned out to be anyway haha!

I did make some progress though - the menu user interface section of Catch a Falling Star is coming a long very nicely, and over the last week I focused mainly on the Change Basket screen - in the game you can unlock additional baskets to both give the player an incentive to carry on playing as well as allowing them to choose their favourite basket and making the game a bit more personal. We're going to have over 20 to start with (we plan on adding lots more in the future!).

One option on this screen would be to always play with a random basket. Selecting the Random Basket option will select randomly from the baskets you've already unlocked. I think it's great, and our players will love it!

Here's a link to my blog post about this, which includes a short video clip demonstrating it: http://alistersoft-indie-dev.blogspot.com/2015/06/progress-report-on-catch-falling-star.html

Feel free to leave comments, I would love to know what you think!

Until next week!
Rudi

To get some much needed practice in C# scripting in Unity (mostly because I'm a PHP developer), I decided to write a simple Unity program that draws two Poker hands from a shuffled deck. It then sorts the cards drawn in order from lowest rank to highest rank (with the lowest card being a 2 and highest being the Ace).

In this blog post, I revealed just how simple it actually was to get this sorting done. I used a sorting algorithm called the Selection Sort, and for something like sorting a few cards in order, it was perfect and extremely simple.

Check out the post here: Simple Sorting Algorithm for a Poker Hand and it'd be great if you use it and let me know!

An introduction post on our Indie Game Development blog. How we joined forces and what can be expected from the blog.