Week 15
This week we discussed targets for the game. When should it be finished by and when would we have a demo ready. We tried to have a demo ready by Friday but unfortunately we failed. Despite the game being interesting and very fun to develop, the support cases have to come first and a surprising abundance of them this week and Rob still being on holiday meant we just didn’t have enough time to work on it. It came as a bit of surprise to me this week when I discovered we needed desktop controls because the game was going to be multi-platform and the dual-joystick imitation controls for keyboard I had made (purely for testing purposes), weren’t going to cut it. After a bit of stressful week, I have to admit that being told this didn’t find me well. Ben spent some time going around the office with the iOS version of the game, which was finished, getting as many opinions as possible so we could polish the demo. Meanwhile I struggled to finish the PC controls and failed. Not a great week in all, but still a fair margin better than any week I’ve ever had in any other job… ever.
Week 16
Unity 4.0 has been announced! It was announced this Monday and boy does that make for a lot of support cases! Rob is now back with us and good job too because I think without him Ben and I would have struggled. This again meant another week with not as much work done on the game as I would have liked. The desktop controls are finished now, but buggy and I’m not happy with them. Also, one of the major things that people noted about the game when Ben showed them last Friday was that they didn’t like the linear mapping between finger-joystick position and player speed. What that means is that there is linear dependence between the distance of your finger and the centre of the joystick and the speed the player moves at. People would have preferred a relationship that meant when you’re near the centre you move slower but then you accelerate faster as you move further away. When I heard this my reaction was “Okay, that’s doable but it’s going to be expensive. We’ll have to do a square-root operation every frame.” God bless Unity though because they have already thought about it. Mark showed me how to sample a curve and apply it to a script and the iOS controls are now far more user-friendly. Another thing that came up is what happens when the player moves behind something. Currently we have a shader that highlights the player so you can still see him. This however sometimes makes it look like the player is on top of the object instead of behind it. So instead I have started to implement a script that will make the objects see-through instead of the player being highlighted. I was having some difficulty with this and with some help from Cat, we nearly got their. I’m confident I can finish this myself early next week.
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