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.