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.

Did some more work on conversation. I can write it so that parts of the text are either replaced by a variable stored in the speaking character, or so that it randomly chooses from a list of text chunks. The default conversation for all characters now looks roughly like this:

[Hi. |Hello. |]I am feeling {mood}.

Which will generate "Hi. I am feeling happy." Or "Hello. I am feeling sad." Or even just "I am feeling happy." depending on which of the phrases are chosen randomly, and what mood the character is.

I've also decided for now to limit the interaction you can do while you are in a conversation. I had major bugs and complications when running around starting conversations with different characters in the middle of ongoing ones. You can leave a conversation and start another one with someone else, but there wont be 2 conversations onscreen at once.

Yeah, I've definitely been working the last three days. Been really busy with the game and schoolwork! So busy that I completely goofed and forgot to update. Tons of stuff has happened since the last update. I added some basic ai that chases the player (also has some that runs away). Teammates added ship and throw animations. Got some cool particle effects and stuff going on too.

Did a bit of AI tweaking, mainly tried to figure out why the hell my interpreters webpage doesn't work on mac or mobile, but works perfect in every windows browser. Ugh, I hate webdev.

Great day for dev today! Art included :) Thinking about entering NaNoRenO as a oncept artist/co-writer for an awesome project idea. Have some owls in the the mean time!

Today I spent mostly creating blog site for Crystal Kindom and fixing some bugs. Blog can be found here - crystalkingdom.net, let me know what you think. ;)

As I promised, here is a very early version of Crystal Kingdom for you to see how current AI works and maybe suggest some improvements and leave feedback. Hope you like it. :)
Click here to try it out
(You need Unity Web Player to play it).

Yesterday's update can be found here.
In a case of any questions or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me here or on twitter. ;)
For more updates, you should follow my twitter account - @PeterLauris and the account of Crystal Kingdom - @CrystalKingdom_.

I redrew the original "One Room Dungeon's" room in the remake's resolution. It's not perfect; I will go back to it and make it look better later.

I also made a spawning animation for the key and got it in the game, added sparkle sprites to draw attention to the key and the chest, and got the key spinning around the player once he or she grabs the key.

Hi, not dead yet. Though I'm sick, so I'd love to be. I think I found a way to optimize the cube rendering by a lot, so I'll do that as soon as I feel better.

Also, I think there is something in my code... Something hostile... And really, really stupid.