New Project Day 4 of 7 Recap

NOTE - I'm posting this one a day late, I worked very late into the night yesterday and didn't get a chance to do the recap before I hit the sack, sorry about that!

*Warning* Some programmer talk here, skip to the next paragraph if you're not interested*

Today I made a push to start implementing more game modes without gutting the existing game functionality.  The existing general game logic is working very nicely, which you've seen from my previous blog posts.  One thing I'm fighting against is the code isn't well organized given how fast I had to create it.  The majority of the game logic is in one class, however there are some snippets in other areas as well.  I don't want to start modifying that too much in order to implement new game specific logic.  In the past I would have used inheritance to extend the existing game logic class and add the new game specific stuff.  However since the logic is a bit scattered, and that fragmentation will likely get worse as I continue, I decided to try something different: a form of composition.  For each new game mode, I create a custom game logic class that registers delegate callbacks for certain events generated by the core game logic. This lets me modify certain areas of the game, and add entirely new things, without changing the underlying game.

Very simple code org. chart

I showed off a build of the current game to a friend today and got some great feedback from him.  We ended up talking for about an hour about some new ideas and game modes I should try to flesh out tomorrow.  In addition, he whipped up some new art assets for me, little cubes that animate!  Adding these instantly made the game look 100% cooler, hopefully we can get some more stuff in there to really spice things up.

I put up a web build of the game here for those feeling adventurous.  There are no directions on how to play, no scoring and no end goal, this is just to show off the mechanics I have in there right now.  Feel free to leave comments/suggestions if you have any.  Depending on how productive I am, tomorrow I'll try to add a build with one of the new game modes implemented.

UPDATE - I'm told by Bryce, who gave me the blocks, that the blocks aren't rotated correctly. Guess I'll add this to the blooper reel. Tomorrow's update with show a better view of them.

In case you missed it, link to the web build: Build1

New Project Day 3 of 7 Recap

Today was both a productive and unproductive day.  It was very productive on one hand because I got a good bit of stuff done; however it was unproductive because most of what I did ended up not being used. That's the life of prototyping games though, sometimes you only make forward progress by seeing what doesn't work and throwing those ideas into the trash bin so other ideas rise to the surface.

Sometimes this is a little discouraging and other times it's a lot of fun throwing a bunch of ideas out there to see what sticks.  What's more important is sometimes the failed ideas lead you down the path to better ideas you end up using.  Here are a couple pictures, one is trying to do some of my own art for the tiles (horribly failed). Other one is a feature I'll probably end up keeping.

Tried adding an icon to the tiles, decide my art skills aren't up to the challenge

Added the circles to the tile drag line to indicate connections between tiles.  Pretty sure I'll keep this. 

And to cap it off here's a video of one of the game mechanics I tried out.  In case you don't want to hear my silky voice narrate, this video shows off shifting tiles around the board before linking groups of them together (they're linked by color) in order to create an explosion.  It's an interesting idea I may continue looking at, it does feel gratifying to move the tiles around and create a large link and explosion.  I may show it to some friends to see what they think, please leave a comment if you have an opinion too!

 

Oh and on the project name front, one of my old bosses suggested Drunken Falcon Punch.  I'm not going to say it's a horrible name, but if anyone comes up with some better suggestions I would definitely welcome them :).

New Project Day 2 of 7 Recap

Unfortunately I didn't get much tangible work done yesterday through a combination of sleeping late and going out with friends.  I felt a little guilty about not making much progress, but then figured I need to have fun like everyone else.  Being a game developer and small biz owner, it's very important to balance work and life so you don't get burned out.  Anywhoo onto game progress....

Spent a bit of time thinking about game and scoring mechanics to use with this game.  I know I'll eventually try out several different ideas, but I want to keep the ideas as constrained as possible so I don't go too far down a path that won't work.  In addition to brainstorming, I created a puzzle board management system that will link with the front-end display system.  I made a system like this previously for Shatter Crash and figured I'd use it for this game; however I'm starting to think I will not use this system for this project.  If this were a longer, more in depth project I probably would, but for such a small and short game, I think it'll just add another layer of abstraction that will get in the way.  Oh well lesson learned...

The one cool thing I did get done was add the ability to randomly colorize the tiles on the board.  I'm pretty sure I'll eventually change this to use unique icons instead of colors, so the game is color blind friendly, but this is a cool step for now.  As an additional cool note, this screen shot is the game running on my iPhone.  It's funny to think of publishing to the iPhone for the first time on this game as a small step.  Just one of the benefits of using Unity.  In fact I could have had the game running on the phone yesterday, but I was actually too busy to take my mac out of my bag and set it up (I started making the game on my PC).

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.

New Short Project Intro...I Guess

Today I decided to make a new game and ideally finish most of the heavy work on it within a week.  To help keep myself honest and on track, I also figured I may as well blog about the experience.  I'm not 100% sure what the game will be, however I'm leaning pretty strongly to doing a simple 2d tile-base puzzle game.  Mechanics for that are relatively simple to create, and there are a lot of cool game variations possible.

Why am I doing this?

My last project Shatter Crash took a little over a year to complete from start to finish.  I still enjoy playing the game and tinkering with it; however working on one project for that long, and as 1 part of a 2 man team, got exhausting.  Doing something short and focused on a tight set of core mechanics will be a breath of fresh air.

What are my goals?
Mainly to have fun and help get myself re-grounded and re-focused.  Finishing off Shatter Crash took a lot of energy and became a grind at the end.  I also want to focus on making something deliberately small in scope and laser focused on a core set of small features.  I tend to feature creep quite a bit, so this is also practice on keeping things small.

Obviously I don't have much to talk about right now as I'm just starting to get things ramped up.  I plan to do at least 1 entry a day to talk about and show off my progress.

Fixing Long Load Times in Shatter Crash

Development on Shatter Crash is moving along pretty well, we are currently working on polishing, UI and bug fixing.  One of the things I decided to tackle today was the long load times we were seeing when traveling from our game play scene back to the main menu scene.  This was especially bad on the iPad's, where we could see load times between 10 and 15 seconds.

The first thing I did was use Unity's cool profiler tool to get a sense of where time was being spent by running the game on my computer. However this ended up failing horribly because the editor continually stalled or crashed while I did deep profiling, probably because the call trees were incredibly deep.  Doing regular, non-deep profiling, didn't flag anything that jumped out as problematic, so I began to suspect the issue had to do with asset loading. As a note, as far as I know Unity's profiler doesn't give much details about asset loading/unloading, so this was simply a theory. (As a note, I didn't have wifi access at the time, so was unable to directly profile the game running on the device.)

I began to suspect the extended load times had to do with our GUI solution forcing Unity to pull in a lot of textures and create a number of object hierarchies.  I tested this by creating an iPad build with most of the UI ripped out to see how much faster the main menu loaded.  To my surprise, it only dropped the load time from ~15 seconds to ~14 seconds...looks like the GUI isn't to blame. I eventually resorted to brute force debugging by removing objects from the scene and pushing a new build to the device to see if things got better.  This certainly wasn't an ideal debug flow, but it did work.

I eventually found the cause of the load time spikes was related to how we referenced the puzzle data for Shatter Crash's game levels.  Our puzzle data is stored in ScriptableObjects for convenience, and each 'level' contains lists with hundreds, or thousands, of entries which define each piece on a puzzle board. For simplicity, I had created a script and prefab which directly referenced each of these puzzle ScriptableObjects (about 30), and this prefab was referenced in the main menu.  Removing the reference to this puzzle container prefab dropped our load times from ~15 to ~3 seconds...sweet problem found!  It seems Unity was taking a long time to load the main menu because it was loading and parsing all the list data in each of the puzzle data files.

Now that I knew the cause of the problem, the fix was fairly straightforward, although a bit tedious.  I changed the puzzle loading system to use Resources.Load to dynamically load the puzzle data we needed on-demand.  I generally shy away from using the Resources.Load() much because it's a real pain in the butt to keep asset paths up-to-date, and when I do I generally write unit tests to validate the existing paths are good.  While I was copy pasting strings, I came up with an idea for a new tool to automatically create Resource paths, hopefully I'll have a chance to create it in the near future

*UPDATE* - The game described here was ultimately released as 'Shatter Crash'.  I edited several places where I referenced it by its old name 'Access Point' to refer to the new name

System.Serializable attribute annoyances in Unity3D

I recently discovered the [System.Serializable] attribute introduces an unfortunate quirk when used in Unity3d, which is very annoying to get around.  When you mark a class as Serializable, Unity will automatically instantiate an object for any field you define of that class type.  Even if you want that field to be null.  Take the following code:

[System.Serializable]
public class SerializableDataClass
{
    public int SomeValue = -1;
}

public class NormalDataClass
{
    public int SomeOtherValue = -1;
}

public class MyMonoBehaviour : MonoBehaviour
{
    // Will Never Be Null, not expected
    public SerializableDataClass DataObj1 = null;

    // Will Remain Null Until Assigned, as expected
    public NormalDataClass DataObj2 = null
}

Logically, you'd expect MyMonoBehaviour's DataObj1 and DataObj2 fields to initialize to null and remain null until assigned an object to reference.  Unfortunately this isn't the case, DataObj1 will automatically have an object created and assigned to it, even if you initialize it to null and try setting it to null in other areas like Awake()/Start()/Update().  This behavior becomes very disruptive if you have logic that triggers based on if DataObj1 != null.