New Project Day 7 of 7 Recap (finally)

NOTE - So I'll admit this 7-day project ended up stretching out much longer than I thought it would in terms of the overall duration. I plan to do a postmortem regarding this project and some of the lessons I've learned to improve the experience when I do it again.

Spent my last day on this project getting my hands dirty with GUI stuff, which ended up swallowing most of my day. I decided to use the NGUI plugin for creating my UI's in Unity for this project, and while it's nice I was scrambling to learn enough to get it functional in my game in any usable form.  I did get a basic score and time display working and added a flare text pop-ups when you gain points, which feels good.

I also spent a bit of time improving the feel of the game by added sounds and animations for user input actions like pressing tiles, dragging times, flipping tiles and detonating tiles.  Below is a small clip to highlight the user feedback.

You can really see the tiles pop-up larger when selected or dragged over while creating a drag connection.  I deliberately made the tiles scale up very large because this will be an iPhone game, and I wanted the tiles to grow large enough so the player can see them under their finger.  I originally used a small scale up, however when I was testing on the phone it didn't read well, so I decided to make it crazy large and felt pretty happy with it.

As for the game mode I talked about earlier, I've decided I probably won't go with that for the final game I release. I kind of liked it, however it felt very un-directed and lacking in substance.  I'm going to spend some time trying out more of a simon-says type mode where you need to create matches based on combinations of shapes the game presents you.  I'll post updates on that as it develops.

I plan to doing a postmortem summary as a different post, however I just wanted to say this "7-day" project was an awesome experience for me and really pulled me out of a funk.  Once I digest some of the lessons from this first experience, I plan on doing another 7-day game in the near future to keep my momentum and creative juices flowing, so stay tuned!

And as a final note, a fellow Raleigh studio BitMonster Games released Lili, their first iOS game today.  I highly recommend you check it out, it's a beautiful game.