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

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

This means that I have to find some music, sound effects, make some better looking graphics, and what I find hardest of all – make the menu system! I’ll keep it as simple as possible.

After I did the DNH game for the GIG 2013, I will not be making an online highscore list. I might do a cookie based one, so the players best score will remain between sessions, but that’s it.

One thing I would really like, is a better player controller. As mentioned in “Player movement script for the 3×3 POC” the motion is done in steps and you can’t move diagonal or change direction while moving. This I need to do better. And I will

Lets see where the game takes me.

– Henning

New things added:

• New texture. I only use one for all surfaces.
• Rotation to selected box, to make it visible to the player what box is selected.
• More states to the box objects, to make possible removal animation aso.
• Color click logic, basic game mechanics .

The plan is to make the game run on my old HTC Desire, to learn the mobile part of unity. So for now I’m trying to keep everything to a minimum as not to drive the Desire to it’s knees.

Next things to add:

• Mobile input part, to see if I can’t get the click and swipe part to work.
• Light bound to the box, to illuminate the boxes in the distance, and I might remove the current spotlight..

Future things to add:

• Sound effects.
• Music.
• Score system. How fast you remove boxes, or something like that, have to think about a good way to differentiate different users abilities.

Here you can play version 4, and as before, click to remove blocks and navigate using wasd.

– Henning

I added some game states but only use playing and dead for now.

Next I would like to make the color selection part to only allow you to remove boxes of same color, so if you click a blue box you can only remove another blue box. If you click another colored box the first selected color will change to this color.

Here you can play version 3, click to remove blocks and navigate with wasd.

– Henning

Finally got around to start on the mock-ups for the project, but first I created the basic Unity setup and copied reusable scripts from the “Do No Harm” project. Then I made a small batch script that creates my basic folder structure, so I don’t have to create it every time I start a new project.

Drew a few texture items to be able to try out some ideas. Without some textures, I find it very hard to gent a good camera angle for the game and how big the game area should be.

Created a basic Sheep in Blender and discarded it, I still don’t know if I’m going to do the game in 2D, 2.5D or 3D.
Made Player script to be able to fire spheres into the scene and sheep script to allow the user to “kill” it, by hitting it 3 times.

Player script:

    void Update()
    {
        if (Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0))// || Input.GetMouseButton(0))
        { // only do anything when the button is pressed:
            Ray ray = Camera.main.ScreenPointToRay(Input.mousePosition);
            RaycastHit hit;
            if (Physics.Raycast(ray, out hit, 1000))
            {
                Vector3 handPosition = transform.position;
                handPosition.x += 0.5f;
                GameObject projectile = (GameObject)Instantiate(bullet, handPosition, Quaternion.identity);
                // turn the projectile to hit.point
                projectile.transform.LookAt(hit.point);
                // accelerate it
                projectile.rigidbody.velocity = projectile.transform.forward * 20;
            }
        }
    }

Sheep Script:

  private int hitsLeft = 3;

    void OnCollisionEnter(Collision collision)
    {
        GameObject.Destroy(collision.collider.gameObject);
        hitsLeft -= 1;
        if (hitsLeft <= 0)
        {
            GameObject.Destroy(gameObject);
        }
    }

 – Henning