Pixicubes Week 3

This week went by very quickly with not much visual progress as I was refactoring/fixing much of the non-visual code. You know, the foundation. That critical but unseen chunk of code that makes your application what it is. I did a refactor of the mouse/touch input code, and when I say refactor I mean rip out and replace. I was unsatisfied with the amount of code there was for managing all the mouse/touch state logic. Plus, when compiling for Android, Unity would complain the mouse code could possibly reduce performance on Android. While I know that there is a difference between touch and mouse, it seems to me that there should be a library that better melts them into something more unified than what is already there. In any case I ended up going with Prime31’s TouchKit.  It’s a nice compact library and it worked well for my purposes, but I’m still unsatisfied with all the #if directives in the code all having to do with mouse vs touch.  Some other things that were accomplished this week:

• The camera is now fixed and no longer orbits the puzzle. Instead the user can pan/zoom around as they please.
• Added some puzzle stats such as push success (how often the player was correct when they pushed the cube in to see if it was correct)
• There are now two types of pixicubes: riddle cubes and theme cubes
• Added block rotation tweens for the theme cubes that visually scrambles the puzzle after you have seen it
• There is now a working PixiCube data structure that can be used to store new PixiCubes
• Puzzle cubes can now be locked and locked cubes have a visible translucent lock shown on them
• Settled on the puzzle sizes for the various difficulty levels (4×3, 8×6, 16×9, and maybe 32×18)
• Added code such that when a puzzle is scrambled, none of the cubes should be oriented correctly
• Numerous refactoring of other code

Stuff for this week:

• Look into storing the jpeg pictures as bytes and loading them into textures at runtime. Currently, Unity pulls in a jpeg and stores it in a much less efficient format in terms of storage size.
• Work on storing the user’s preferences and their puzzle progress i.e. which cubes are completed, which puzzles on which cubes are yet to be finished, how many pixi-points they have, which powerups and how many do they have etc.
• Try to implement some of the powerups
• Decide if I want to offer extra downloadable PixiCube packs. If I do I’ll have to figure our Asset Bundles and how to work with them etc.
• Work on a cool title screen where the logo starts out scrambled and is automatically solved
• More sounds
• The user interface is non-existent and must be completed before the deadline!