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[Jasper Flick]

I've always wanted to make a tile path game, and now I'm doing it! I actually created a small wooden version years ago, but that doesn't count. So, here goes...

Walk the Tiles

Description
You rotate and place tiles to construct a path through a grid. The goal is to get a very long and intertwined path. If you know Entanglement, you could consider it a clone of that game. The difference is that it'll have more tile shapes. I started with squares because they're easy, but will also include triangles and hexagons, both regular grids and semiregular combinations. Maybe octagons too, if it doesn't get too unwieldy.

Technical
I'm using Unity3D and am currently developing for web and iOS. As soon as I have a good enough alpha I'll put it online.

Graphics
So far I'm using Inkscape to create lines and POV-Ray to render tile materials. Here are two screenshots.

[Jasper Flick]

I added a triangle grid. The path for this one sure is more wiggly than for square tiles!

I spent some time thinking about a nice way to score a path. I want to encourage two things: connecting to long existing path segments, and visiting each tile as often as possible. I came up with the following:

• when a tile gets added, walk as far as possible, giving 1 point for the first step, 2 points for the second, and so on;
• the score for each tile gets multiplied by how many visited path segments it has, including the new one.

For example, you place a new tile that immediately connects to another tile that was visited once. You'd get (1 * 1) + (2 * 2) points for that. If that would lead to a third tile that was visited once before, you'd get an additional (3 * 2) points. If that tile had been visited two times before, you'd get (3 * 3) extra points instead. With some luck and skill, you can get huge scores this way.

[mokesmoe]

You could add a memory stile game where the white lines are invisible like in the second screen shot during the game for all tiles that are on the board already.

[TomHunt]

kind of reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantrix

[Jasper Flick]

You could add a memory stile game where the white lines are invisible like in the second screen shot during the game for all tiles that are on the board already.

Hey, that's an interesting idea! I'm gonna try that out.

kind of reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantrix

Definitely the same type of game. I've never seen that one before though, thanks for the link.

[oahda]

I don't know exactly what this is, but it sure looks like the kind of game that I could have a lot of fun with.

[Jasper Flick]

Skomakar'n, I sure hope so! I must admit that I'm already suffering from the just-one-more syndrome. I have a tendency to test too thoroughly while I should be programming.

Added the possibility for semiregular tiling. I just finished the elongated triangular tiling.

I'll try snub square tiling next.

[Jasper Flick]

And here it is!

Code's a mess by now, going to clean it up before adding hexagons.

[oahda]

Looks awesome.

This can't still be 0 %, can it?

[Jasper Flick]

It is! I'll set it to 10% once I can show off hexagons.

[Jasper Flick]

All right, here are the hexagons. 10% progress it is! Had to zoom out, as these tiles are large.

Spent time doing some much-needed code cleaning. It's better now, though there's still some dirty stuff left.

So far the game doesn't have a menu interface yet. I hard-code which grid shows up, and when the game ends you have to restart to try again. It's time to change that, so I'll work on that next.

[Daniel Seabra]

This looks really cool! Something else I need to keep an eye on

[Jasper Flick]

Not much happened, I worked on other stuff. I did manage to get a minimal menu working, but there's not much to show yet.

I went to a birthday party yesterday and took this game with me on my iPad. Big success! People liked it all around and one person couldn't stop playing it.

[Jasper Flick]

I'm back! After taking a vacation and dealing with other projects, I can work on this game again!

I've decided to try something different. Recently I created some Unity tutorials. As an extension of that, I'm going to turn this game into a tutorial too. Don't get me wrong, it's still going to be a full-fledged game, but now the code itself must become a polished product as well.

So now I have two goals (fun game, good tutorial) and target two audiences (casual gamers, novice Unity game developers). It's gonna be a fun challenge!

To get an idea of the kind of tutorial it's gonna be, check out my other tutorials. This one will be a larger effort though, and won't be available for free.

Right now I'm revisiting my code and basically deciding to rewrite most of it. It works but is definitely not easy to understand. That's not good enough anymore!

[Destral]

Cool reworking of an already neat project. I'm interested in both aspects of it - been meaning to learn Unity at some point - so I'll be keeping an on this one

[Mikademus]

Very nice! I have developed a tile engine that supports arbitrary geometries and currently supports square, hexagonal and triangular tiles myself. So far all are symmetric, though, but I have been thinking of adding asymmetric periodic tile types, like Penrose tiling, too. Anyway, your game reminds me of formal knot theory and seems like a very nice brain buzzer!

As for creative fodder, have you thought about the old games Flooz and Pipe Dreams? In them you connected pipes, and after a while a liquid started running through them and you had to connect to an outlet before the fluid caught up with you. Perhaps that could be added as a mode or game play aspect?

[Jasper Flick]

Thanks, Destral!

Mikademus, some flood-like game mode might make it into the game. I'll try it out at some point for sure. Currently the tile grids are generated procedurally, but I'm looking into making it editor-based, allowing far more control and diversity. Right now I'm examining whether it's a good idea to put asset generation right into Unity, instead of relying on another tool (currently Inkscape) to create the graphics.

[Jasper Flick]

Experimented with a cubic bezier curve in Unity. First, to create a list of points on the curve, using recursive subdivision. Second, to move with a constant speed along the curve. Third, to convert the curve into a texture (in the below image it's colored by distance from the curve).

So now I'm able to generate both the texture and the point list directly in Unity. This is good, because it makes it easy to include animations that traverse the path created by the player.

[Jasper Flick]

Another thing I need to move all asset creation into Unity is a gradient tool. Because Unity doesn't have one, I added it myself. I've never worked with custom assets and inspectors before, so this was new. It's nothing fancy, but took a while because Unity's documentation is a bit lacking for extensions like this. Definitely something to include in the tutorial.

[Jasper Flick]

Bezier + distance map + gradient =

Next, I'll work on a tile editor.