I had to think of something? Sleeping until 7 and didn’t help, food and a shower.. Now an idea started to form. The void ship from the Dr. Who series and the hunt for the Maquis from Star Trek, void ship = between worlds,  hunt for the Maquis = turbulent and violent space.. hmmm. To the blackboard, and draw 3D, draw 2.5D, ok then 2d.. Couldn’t figure out how I wanted the game to look, as I would like to do it in 2d (haven’t done 3d since unity came out with their 2d support), I just couldn’t squash the 3D into 2D.

Remembering that I only had 48 hours and 5 was gone sleeping, eating and showering already. I had to keep it simple. So why not having two universes, one on top of the screen and one on the bottom, and having to fight invaders from the other universe. So I set out to do so.

What I have ended up with is almost that. Only change is that the enemy ships are wormhole generators that you have to shoot down before they can open a wormhole, and there by destroying the other universe (I have allowed myself some freedoms as I do not know how wormhole from a universe with other lawn of nature would impact our universe or it’s even possible).

You can play the game Join Us! online, or download the PC version here.

Learned a lot, especially not to optimize as much as I do. I have done some things where I thought, this will be slow, but it’s micro seconds, so doesn’t matter. Ended up with at most 10 draw calls which is nothing. Now I have uploaded the PC version and the web version to Ludum Dare I don’t really wan’t to work on it any more, I’m mentally tired and just want to relax and not think about “Join Us!” anymore,  for now…

It’s been fun and amazing to see how much you can do, when you don’t focus on having to deliver something amazing and super polished, but just a game someone would enjoy So hope you will play it, enjoy it, and rate it on Ludum Dare.

Now, go make games

– Henning

I’ve changed a few things, and some things I really don’t get why is happening.

1. First thing that was noticed was that the game doesn’t fill the entire screen.
   This is as designed All players are to have the same playing area, same height and same width. If this wasn’t the case, some resolutions could have an advantage, for instance; a high narrow screen would be a lot better than a wide screen, as the ball has a lot less chance of hitting a seagull. There are probably a lot more scenarios where aspect ratio matters, but to make sure every player sees the same, the aspect ration is fixed. I did add a frame to the game area, to make it visible that the size is as intended. So no big change here.
2. The game runs very fast on low-end devices.
   Ok, this one I don’t get? Everything that moves in the game is either controlled by the physics engine or is moved by scripts, and yes I have checked, every movement is done using Time.deltaTime. So?
   I did some digging, and found a possible solution, not that I can see why it should work? Time.deltaTime should still make everything move with the correct speed? But it’s worth a try.
   Under quality setting I found that the setting for VSync Count was set to “Don’t Sync” for the Fastest and Fast levels. So I have changed them to do VSync, to see if this solves the problem on the low-end devices.
   

Well that’s about it for a couple of days testing Thanks again to all the testers and the people helping to spread the game.

The newest version of the game can always be found in the bottom of the post Seagull Hunt.

Now go make games!

– Henning

Here is what I started out with, and what I ended up with so far.

Started out with a ball on a screen. Had no idea what the game should be about.. Didn’t even know it would become a game.

Then made the ball fall under the influence of gravity, and added a small static cannon capable of shooting small red balls.

Added colliders to the balls, so the red balls could hit the red ball and then, to make a bit of a game out of it, I added some spikes, that killed the yellow ball on impact.

Added some graphics, and changed the mail ball to a beach ball.

At this time I did my small crap animation project, so of cause that was added to the project. I also did the super soaker graphics while trying out different vector based drawing programs and that was added as well.

The red balls was replaced by a water ball/splash texture.

Added a basic score, so each time you hit the beach ball with a ball of water you got a point, and game when the beach ball hit the sand.

I got the idea to add something to hit instead of just having to hit the beach ball, which was to easy.

I wanted to have a really fast game over to new game cycle, so all I wanted was a single start button in the middle of the screen. At first I would have liked to be able to share scores on Facebook, but as I haven’t gotten it to work 100% I discarded it for now. Maybe in a later version.

Just changed some of the background graphics, and added best score to the score display.

Added sand to the beach.

Completely new graphics, made by a nice fellow that I’m teaching to program, and in exchange his making me some pleasant graphics

New button and font added, that matches the rest of the theme better. The basic font is called Floraless and is made by Daniel Gauthier.

Small but very visual change, I made the score use the new font, by having a bitmap for each number and one for the slash, and then added code to convert the string into an array of the correct sprites.

The last change was the graphics for the crab that now looks a lot more organic and less flat.

The two thing keeping me from uploading it to the android store is the seagull- and the crap-animation. I will work on the crap animation as soon as everything thats happening in my life right now, settles down a bit.

If you want to try the current (Android only) version of “Beach Fun Seagull Hunt” just click the link below.
Old version April 9th : md5 : aad8aee9879d29ad0e8bf32cc451b097 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk
New version April 12th : md5 : 5f145660cae4dab6d5c4fea869403f36 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk

Now go make games!

– Henning

Not something I will ever forget to do ever, ever, ever again.. So now everything works, and the game is really starting to take shape. The audio is still horrible, and the gameplay needs some adjustment, whats to add time bonus/limits, but I really like what the game is morphing into.

I have only one android device, so I’m looking forward to having friends test it on their devices, to see if there are problems with the different resolutions and aspect ratios. Which has really given me a lot of headaches, and maybe for nothing.. It have been a lot easier to work with, now that I’ve started using rich text in all my GUI text. It all looks good in unity, but you never know what might pop up on strange devices

Now go make games!

– Henning

The progress of the development of 3×3.

Hope you’ll enjoy it too. 3×3 Final version.

– Henning

• I have opened the sides of the tunnel and added some stars to get away from the very claustrophobic feel.
• I added a single power up in form of the ability to remove an entire wall. The power ups spawn every 10 to 20 seconds and they stack.
• The biggest change is the textures of the boxes. I really spend a lot of time trying different textures, shapes and colors, still I’m not 100% satisfied, but I think it’s better than before.

If anyone would like to do some textures for the game, feel free to contact me, I’m sure you could do better than what I ended up with

One thing suggested that I would have liked to include, was an idea to have the tunnel twist and turn. But as this was never the intention, the code would have to be rewritten from the ground up. So this will, if ever, have to wait to future project.

Play version 10. Enjoy and please send feedback.

– Henning

I have used the last days to add a lot of small things to the game, tweaking it, and playing it, again and again. I also had a friend play it, a lot, to see if I missed something obvious.

Here’s a list of what I have done.

• Added particle effect for the box explosions.
• Updated sound effects.
• Added Gui Skin
• Added Font
• Changed resolution to 1024×768.
• Player control, motion can now be changed in mid move.
• Collider made smaller for when player is rotating.
• Added Crash SFX
• Updated Move class to separate horizontal and vertical movement to allow diagonal movement.
• Added 10000/15000/20000 points SFX
• Added level 10/15/20 SFX
  
• Added Audiosource mini buffer to hold 4 audio sources.
• Adjusted colors of boxes to make them easier to distinguish.
• Added plane to slowly revile the boxes, and not just pop into existence in the back of the scene.
• Updated all level and point SFX.
• Adjusted music slowdown to 0.75 instead of 0.5 when dead.
• Changed font to Plasmatica by Apostrophic Labs.
• Adjusted GUI boxes to match the new font

The best update, is the ability to move freely, and in all directions. I thought this would be a pain to make work as I wanted, but with a few changes to the already existing moving class, and the separation of horizontal and vertical movement, it was surprisingly easy.

One thing I didn’t expect to give me any problems was the colors of the boxes, but as I tried to make the colors easier  to distinguish from each other, the bigger problems I got with the lighting settings. First the scene was overlit when the boxes came close to the spot close to the player,  then under lit. Then the ambient light made everything look flat, and so on. So I ended up spending almost 3 hours adjusting colors and light settings. But I’m finally happy with the result.

After I added more sound effects I found that they would cut off each other, so I added a mini buffer, to hold 4 audio sources and use the first available. This gave a hole new, and more complete feel, to the game.

Hope you enjoy the game And have time to send me some feedback.

– Henning

As the game is going to be have a lot of cartoon violence and blood, I added a blood spray when the projectile (rock) hits the sheep to see if it would work, and I think it does Adjusted way to much on the particle systems parameters for a prototype, but it does a lot for the game feel to have some visual feedback on a hit.

Next couple of tasks will be sheep movement and angle calculations to make the projectiles hit where you aim.

Remember that all the graphics is only placeholders, the final graphics, if the game is fun enough, will be done by someone who knows what they are doing

– Henning

After moving the rigidbody, script and mesh collider to child object the collider is oriented as expected.

The sheepScript removing the sheep now only removed the child object because of the new placement of the script. But that should only be a matter of destroying the parent game object instead of the current game object.

The screenshot is horrible and it’s suppose to, the focus shouldn’t be on graphics for now, but only on getting a prototype up and running to see if the gameplay is fun.

– Henning