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

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

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