New Project Day 1 of 7 Recap

After deciding to do this week long project yesterday, I jumped right in and started getting my hands dirty.  I'm using Unity3d to develop this game, I've been using it for 3 years or so now so I have a pretty good feel for working with it.  I also decided to make this an iOS/Android project.  If you want to ignore this wall of text, there's a movie at the bottom showing my progress.

I spent a bit of time mulling over what type of game to make.  7 days isn't a lot of time, especially when working more or less alone on this project.  I eventually settled on making a puzzle game that focuses on tapping and swiping.  Tapping and swiping are fun gestures to use on your phone, so I figured that would be a good basis to start from.

I started out making a system to lay out a grid of tiles to represent the puzzle pieces.  Once I had a grid layout working, I began working on some basic input so I could tap to select a tile and then tap another tile to force them to flip position.  To add some life to the tile movement, I used Prime31's GoKit Tween Library to animate the translation and scaling of the tiles so they felt more interesting.

Next I started working on the drag selection and line drawing system.  This turned out to be fairly involved to get working, especially the line-drawing part.  I initially tried using Unity's built in line rendering system, but that exhibited some annoying deformation when the line changed direction, resulting in an non-uniform line...ewww

Luckily I came across a blog with some solutions to this particular problem.  I ended up implementing a custom line rendering system using the Unity'd Graphics API, which worked wonderfully.  You can see the results in the movie below.

That's it for the 1st day recap.  Today I'll be working on adding the ability to unselect a tile when dragging, adding some constraints to the drag system, and beginning to create a backend system to track each spot on the board.