Sunday, November 24, 2013

Unity Prototype (Prototype 4)

So, for this week we're supposed to create a prototype of our game in Unity3D. I've spend a LOT of time trying to get started with my game. Starting all over on the game was hard for me and especially creating a functional 2D game in Unity, a platform that takes months to really get into, made me spend many ours without getting anywhere. 
Since the kind of game GeoStoric Challenge was in Stencyl could not be converted directly to the same kind of game in Unity, I came up with a new graphical design.
Instead of having a flat 2D map screen i created a Sphere game object in Unity that contained the image of the map. 
For the player controlled UFO i created a Capsule game object and made it look a bit like a UFO. 

So my first idea was to let the main camera follow the top of the UFO and make the UFO able to be controlled all the way around the globe and at different 'altitude levels'. 
But since this required a lot of code that I had no clue on how to write, I researched moving around a sphere. I found a solution by letting the main camera sit above the UFO and instead of moving the UFO the Sphere (world) would just rotate to give the effect of a moving UFO. Again this was too hard to do since I just couldn't find out how to rotate the sphere on the button-down events. 
Unfortunately the overwhelming amount of work I had to put into a game I had already created got the best of me and i simply decided that Unity is not the platform i want to develop this game in. I published what i made, but no controls are available, but just for you to see the concept i was talking about. 

Here's a screenshot:


And here's the link:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39347892/Game.html

And there's no reason for me to record a video of me playing it. Sorry.

Friday, November 15, 2013

GSC in Multiplayer Mode

Multiplayer mode is a feature i'd love to improve GeoStoric Challenge with. 
The single player mode is in itself a kind of multiplayer because every score is saved in the high scores, which means that everyone's actually playing against everyone. But i've been thinking about a multiplayer part of the game that has its own high score. In this mode, up to 2 players can play at the same time against everyone else or against another 1 or 2 players. 
This means that the game will get 1v1 and 2v2 modes. 
When two players are playing together, one of the players control the UFO while the other player answers the questions. 
Instead of having 5 random locations to guess like the normal 'singleplayer' version, this version of the game has a countdown - from, for example, 5 minutes. The team then has to score as many points as possible within the 5 minutes in the same locate-and-answer-level.
Teams can choose to challenge other teams in 5 minute duels where the objective is the same as described above, but the teams are then compared to each other after the 'match'. All scores are saved in the high scores for this game version. 


The multiplayer mode will not be the good old split-screen style which means that the teams wont be able to see each other while playing, but all scores and stats will be compared and shown to both teams after each match. 

This is a first idea of a multiplayer version of the game. I'd love to hear from you guys what you think about it or if you have great ideas for it.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

A Third Prototype...

I was looking very much forward to releasing my third prototype of GeoStoric Challenge, but fortune was not on my side this week. 
As i was implementing the Kongregate API to make the game more competitive by having highscores, Stencyl somehow deleted a whole event class within the most important scene of my game.
I spend hours trying to restore the game as it was before, but without luck. 
What was supposed to be implemented this week was a whole new level and the highscores.
There's not much to say about the highscore system as Kongregate has a brilliant API for it. 
The new level was something i really thought would improve the game. Taking Eric Gagnon's suggestions about marking the countries of the world into consideration i decided not to implement it to the current 'guess the location' level. Instead i wanted to create a whole new level where the player had to guess which country was shown on a figure. I still have plans of doing this, when i recreate the game, but for now i'll be focusing on restoring the game.
I've decided to give Unity a try and since starting all over in Stencyl would take almost the same time, this is a perfect chance for me to move to the Unity platform.
Unfortunately I will be going away for the rest of the week which means i wont have a prototype ready, but I'll be happy to share it with you guys next week! 

Thanks for reading!

Kewin