Category: Development

Yesterday I pushed the button and release Buggers (my February project) to itch.io for PC,Mac, and Linux. It always amazes me how many bugs you find whenever you are getting ready to release a piece of software. It seems as though as soon as you finish preparing the release package, you find something that requires you to start over. Heck, about an hour after I released V1.00, I found bugs I felt needed to be fixed, so I rebuilt and very briefly retested all my platforms and uploaded the files. Then this morning while preparing an apk file for Android release, I found some more stuff that needed to be fixed, so the through the process I went yet again. Anyway, as I write this, Buggers is sitting at V1.02 and that will hopefully be as far as it goes for now.

Here’s what’s been done since the last post:

• Implemented a news subscription dialog in the game
• Implemented in-game voting when all game levels are complete
• Cleaned up and fixed all my NGINX config files to work correctly with my now multiple SSL certs
• Installed/ configured mailing list server software
• Refactored bug pathing and upgraded the pathing library to the pro version
• Added local and global highscores
• Lots of bug fixes
• Removed the bordering bush requirement for levels
• Mud now slows the player down
• Added a custom cursor
• Added a custom icon (done quickly and could be better)
• Added screenshot capability to the desktop versions (press f11 while in-game)
• Fixed several tile types not having colliders and layers set properly.

This month I was 3 days late releasing, but that extra time allowed me to get some much-needed infrastructure in place that will carry over for the rest of the games I’ll be building in the next 5 months. Today I released the Android apk to itch.io as well as the Google Play store.

In my scurry to begin the iOS release process, I realized once again how much time it takes.  I’ve done iOS releases twice before and while it has gotten better since my first one, I have determined that it will require too much time per month to do the release. Therefore, I’m amending my rules to remove the requirement for a monthly iOS release, but I still plan on releasing all 6 of my creations to iOS after July 2016 when my game/month plan is done. Now to get started on my March project …

This is the last day for my February project, but the game may not be released today. The game can be made ready today, and that’s still possible, but before that happens, I need to get a web-component setup. This component is not part of the game, but it will hopefully help with promoting Pixelbyte’s upcoming games. Once I get it working, I will put a link to it in the game and we’ll be good to go. I don’t expect this to take too long, and it might possibly all get done today, but it could also take 2 or three more days.  I’m just not sure. I do know that this does need to be done, and it will only need to be done once, so my next 5 “1 month challenge” games will not suffer this delay. My original plan was to release 6 games for 5 platforms in 6 months. I still plan to do 6 games, but I may reserve one or two of those games for the desktop.  I’m still not sure about that, but some genres just don’t do well with virtual joysticks and buttons. To be honest, I don’t like virtual joysticks/buttons for any kind of mobile action game. They just frustrate me, and that’s because of the lack of tactile feedback that a keyboard, mouse, or joystick gives you.  When you push on a real joystick, you can feel when you reach the limit. Not so with a virtual joystick.  I feel like a hypocrite though because I have a virtual joystick in Buggers.  I don’t like it, but if I want to release to the mobile/pad ecosystems, I have to do it.

Here is what has been accomplished this week:

• Squashed many more bugs in the Tiled loader scripts. They actually are working quite nicely now.
• Implemented a new enemy using my behavior library. This is the first real thing I’ve done with behaviors and my library. As a result, I learned good stuff and many enhancements/additions were made to the library. [I spent way too much time on this]

  

• Many improvements were made to Pixelbyte’s core libraries.
• Polished and fixed many UI elements
• Added multiplayer support (only for PC/Mac/Linux and it will probably not be in the first release)
• Updated the in-game instructions screen
• Added some cool features that allow for level development and testing using a build of the game.
• Added sound effects for the player’s food vacuum. This was an interesting and fun exercise in that the sound needed to be broken up into 3 parts: vacuum start, vacuum on, and vacuum stop.
• Implemented a scoring system that gives a player points for all bugs killed. Each piece of food put into a basket gives the player points plus a bonus multiplier that is applied to every bug killed. For example, if the player baskets a single piece of food, the bonus multiplier increases to 2x.  Every bug killed by the player then give 2x the normal points, unless a bug steals the food from the basket.
• Added an in-game poll which allows players that complete the game to vote on a couple of questions about the game.

  

Stay tuned.

It’s been over a week since my last update and according to my rules I’m supposed to do at least one of these per week. Since my last update I have:

• Improved/refactored a bunch of my Tiled map importer code
• Converted all my levels (there’s only 11 so far) over to the TMX map format
• Added a more interesting end of level dialog that shows bugs killed and all the food you kept safe
• Made changes/improvements to the virtual joystick controls for mobile
• Refactored some of my UI code into what I think is a pretty good re-usable mobile dialog class for Unity’s UI
• Made many changes to my core Unity3d library code
• Many bug fixes
• Installed El Capitan and the newest XCode on my MAC mini
• Got all my expired iOS certificates and other assorted Apple obstacles cleaned up
• Got a build of the game up and running on an iPhone
• Ripped out the Ludum Dare quality “sound system” script stuff and integrated Audio Toolkit into the project
• Found a nice SerializableDictionary implementation complete with a property drawer from spacepuppy’s Unity framework
• Found a great free 32×32 outdoor tileset and spent far too much time slicing and dicing it into something I’m not even sure I’ll be able to use.
• Went off on a tangent and updated my Paint .NET animation plugin with a UI redesign and another option for outputting an animation strip. I haven’t officially released the changes yet.

Things I still need to get done:

• Redo any sound effects I don’t like, make new ones for some stuff that doesn’t have a sound
• Do something with the current little musical pieces. Throw them out, redo them, or something. I’m not quite sure what to do about this one yet.
• I think I want to implement some sort of scoring system that gives you points for bugs killed and some sort of bonus multiplier for each piece of food you get into a basket before the level is completed.
• I’ve been thinking about letting the player poison food so that when bugs (except for roaches) try to pick it up, they get poisoned and die. This should impose some sort of tradeoff for the player i.e. the player looses a bonus multiplier or pays some points to do this because he is essentially ruining a piece of the food he is trying to protect
• Make the player’s health persist between levels
• Add something to let the player heal
• I think I would like a high score list. I though about using Google’s Play Games Plugin for Unity but it doesn’t work for PC/Mac/Linux. I want to have something like dreamlo’s free leaderboard but running on my own server. I wonder if I have time to implement it…