Thanks for the write-up; gives me plenty to think about in my next project!

My artist completely redid the menu graphics...but he managed to keep all the buttons in the same exact place and same exact size even though everything looks completely different now so it was simply a matter of dragging and dropping the new assets in and not having to reposition or reengineer anything. Hurray!

I think I understand Git now.

Great success 

A common bit of feedback from Chemical Cubes (check my sig for a link w/ playable web demo) players is that everything seems to fall apart quickly after your first strike -- it's really hard to recover once you screw up once. We decided to make a change so that everything slows down dramatically when you mess up, but quickly speeds back up over a second or two to the regular speed. This lets players feel that heroic "I just pulled that out when everything was surely lost!" emotion.

This function is called LetsDoTheTimeWarp(), of course.

Enemy ships in my pseudo-TD now shoot back at the player 

di.fm Minimal station 

Pretty cool. I really like the art on the pumpkin head guy. Sliding move feels good. The in-the-tent scenes look great, and the pacing felt pretty good too (I played through the Vampire boss)

[Chemical Cubes]

Hi! I'm proud to announce that we've officially released Chemical Cubes to both the Amazon and Play Store marketplaces!

Chemical Cubes is a simple color-matching game. Play to work out your brain and increase focus!
It's pretty easy. It's a simple, yet fast paced game based on lining up colored cubes vertically before they hit the Zapper at the end of the Screen!
1. Tap on a cube to select it.
2. Tap any other cube to switch their positions.
3. Match up the colors vertically before they get Zapped.
4. Repeatedly Zap rows of the same color to boost your Combo Multiplier!
5. Couldn't line up a row properly before it got to the end? That's a strike! 3 strikes and you're out - GAME OVER.







Gameplay trailer on




You can currently find Chemical Cubes on:
*Our website (which has a FREE WEB DEMO)
*Google Play Store
*Amazon Kindle Edition

We'd also love to hear from you on Twitter and Facebook.

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The game was developed in our "spare" time using Unity3D over a total of about 6 months by a team of 4 spread around the U.S., with the pace picking up a bit since the beginning of September. For most of us, this is our first commercial release. I've become a huge fan of what's achievable in Unity due to its rapid iterative process. Having a prebuilt framework that lets test, tweak, and observe data and variables in realtime is amazing.

A rudimentary gameplay trailer for Chemical Cubes! (No link yet...pending approval from the rest of team)

Finally got to the point where we felt comfortable releasing Chemical Cubes! Woohoo! It's available on Android and Kindle Fire right now...but I'm planning on making a full post in the releases section with all the details. This is more of a "awww yeah, the programming side finally came together to a releasable state" post.

Also, made some good progress on the prototype for the next project, too. I'm laying out the architecture for a TD variant in Unity, and have been focusing on little-picture stuff (units and their components for now) so it doesn't seem like it's advancing very much...but next step is to get everything working together so I should see some big visible gains coming up.

Using Monodevelop with Unity. I have auto-formatting on. Works fine on my desktop, and used to work fine on my laptop, but tonight whenever I close a brace on an if() statement, the brace doesn't show up and the first character in the statement of the if() gets deleted. Pressing the close brace button again will delete another character.

:boggle:

Unity is interesting. It's what I'm currently being taught to use. I like how it has multi language support and the tagging/prefab features are very handy. There is also plenty of help available online, in books, et cetera.

I've had my fair share of UNITY WHAT THE HELL moments though.

I've had (and still discover) quite a few UNITY WHAT THE HELL moments, too.

The good news is...usually it means I wasn't doing something the "proper" way, and by researching the issue I've found there is already an elegant and robust solution lurking in the shadows and waiting for me in every case.

Trying to debug various mobile-specific issues in Unity 

My main menu is set up as a set of simple scenes that load each other based on which menu options are clicked (For example, Main Menu scene takes you to Choose Difficulty scene when you click on Play). There are some scenes that simply show some data (credits, high score) and return you to the main scene when you click/tap anywhere on the screen. If I tap my Credits scene in a place where there is a button on the Main Menu screen, after the Main Menu loads and I try to select another menu it will take me to the menu that had a button where I tapped on the Credits screen.

The script that detects the touch is attached to the Camera in each scene and passes the touch to the appropriate menu object to call the transition script. These should be completely independent of any other scene, but somehow the touch detection script from Scene A is managing to pass a message to an object in Scene B, when the two should not be loaded at the same time.

Put the finishing touches on my first to-be-published game this week! Woohoo!

Now it's sent off to the one guy on the team with a proper tablet to test it...fingers crossed that everything works well. I came in towards the latter half of the project, with the core gameplay already in place. Spent a solid month adding features, polishing the GUI and menus, and implementing some neato effects that really help with the player experience.

I'm in love with the ridiculously fast iterative development cycle achievable in Unity.

 

I think one solution to the doors problem is to start with all of them connected, as previously mentioned, and then erase doors with the condition that no room is inaccessible or too "far" from the starting point (or, alternately, too far from the main "ring" hallway).

Let's use the "distance from ring" approach, for sake of illustration.
So here's your algorithm so far:
1. Create ring
2. Add big rooms
3. Add medium rooms
4. Add small rooms
5. Connect all rooms with doors to all adjacent rooms and hallways

Now, the door-pruning part.
6. Assign each room a depth of MAX=99 (or suitably high number, that would effectively be infinite)
7. Assign the hallway "room" a depth of 0.
8. For currentDepth = 0, currentDepth < MAX, currentDepth++
      For each room, if depth = counter, explore all connections.
         For each connection to current room, if its depth is greater than the current depth + 1, assign a depth of current depth + 1. Otherwise, don't change it
This will give each room the proper depth with all doors. This algorithm isn't particularly optimized, but it'll work. A quick optimization would be a check to see if all rooms have been assigned a depth, then break out of the outermost loop if true
9. Attempt to remove a door at random. Recalculate the depth of the rooms adjacent to the removed doorway, adjusting the depth of it to the highestNeighborDepth + 1. If this would make a room have a depth beyond your maximum desirable depth, then revert the change and replace the door. An optimization to this would be to then mark that "door" as not desirable to remove and preclude it from being checked for removal again.
10. Repeat step 9 a number of times.

Hoping to have some free time tonight to attack this. Overtime sucks!

Writing code tonight for the first time in :checkCalendar(): 3 months Feels good, man.

A list of things that I want to create!

Including but not limited to an A.Life sandbox toolkit

SpaceWar clone/upgrade