Hellooooo Ya'll!
First of all, if you haven't played it...
PLAY DONUT GET!It's free on our site
Sokay.net*AHEM*
I've been on a bit of a Donut Get! hiatus. I was super burned out with working on it nonstop, doing the monthly downtown Los Angeles art walk show. And still having more work to do.
Fortunately I got the opportunity to do some freelance work to break up the monotony a bit. I worked on a project for Google Fiber for a guy I used to work with. That was mostly fun and different. I was happy that it was for a touch-screen kiosk rather than a typical website or something.
I had quit my job back in February with the intention of getting more comfortable with Unity. I've been an advocate for years but I haven't focused on any project to make use of my license. With Donut Get!
mostly out of the way, it was finally time to start working on it.
But I had a bit of a conflict. I didn't do any spectacular launch with Donut Get! but I was just trying to move on from it because it's been consuming my life for a long time. Every time I showed my games at the Art Walk during Sokay Play people were always asking me if I "had an app" for our games. Nope!
Of course nobody realizes the work that would take to take something from Flash to mobile. In some cases the Air exporter would be fine, but in its state Donut Get! is something that can bring a desktop to its knees. Flash just isn't efficient enough. I had pondered a Unity port, but porting the 3 game engines, all the cinematics, etc, etc was just a dumb idea. So much of the tricks I use are dependent on the way Flash works. Way too much work.
One weekend, I started messing around with Unity. I put together a quick demo like before I went out clubbing in Hollywood or something. Came back to it the next day while doing laundry or something. I just dropped in art from Donut Get! and started getting things moving around. A couple menus... some simple touch controls. I had a pretty good proof of concept. This would work. I could do just a simple port of the Donut segment of the game. Just leave out unnecessary stuff. And it gave me an opportunity to figure out how Unity ticks.
I'd done a bunch of demos in Unity. Basically to feel it out and get a sense for how things worked. Our teams
Global Game Jam 2011, Devoid, game was in Unity and that helped a ton. But making a finished game from start to finish is definitely another story.
Working on a Donut Get! port of Unity was actually very helpful. It gave me a clear goal. I had all of the art assets. So I just had to focus on figuring out a pipeline to get my Flash animation into Unity. I had all the sound, so I had to figure out how to get it them to play.
So I've been doing it in C# and it's been coming along pretty smoothly. UI has definitely been one of the biggest problems. Flash and UI go hand in hand. Not the case with Unity. Fortunately there were great tools in the Unity Asset store. After doing a bit of research, I decided to give
NGUI a try which happened to be on sale. I paid about $80 for it, think I already got my money's worth just saving a bunch of time. It's got its issues, but working with it helped me to understand some things.
Anyway, here's what it's looking like!
Testing it here on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which I picked up on sale at Best Buy a few months ago to get a feeling of what Android was about and for testing.
I have a 1st gen iPad which is slow as hell in comparison to the Tab, but runs the game no prob so far. I think the framerate is a bit lower though.
So this is what the game looks like running in the editor. I'm literally only using planes for all the models, 2 tris. I found a great Unity script for creating models of 2 poly planes, since the default Unity plane model has way too many subdivisions.
Okay that was a lot, but there's more!
My 2012 Game Reel
Check out my
2012 Game Reel, which is many of the Flash games I've worked on over the years.
Peace!
