Pitch Alpha

Well after much effort, my little Pitch project is now in Alpha. I need to create the audio content and integrate that into the game, then integrate Unity Ads, and then it's time for a tiny semi-public beta, and then, the release to the masses on the public market places!

I'm excited. For audio, I'm messing around with an amazing little Sampling Studio called Independence by MAGIX, and Reaper for recording the "Inde" VST output. More on this later. I'm exhausted, and heading to bed.

Unity wtf Unity?!

Unity 5 has had me pulling out my hair trying to solve a very simple task. (Animating a sliding menu panel on a button click event) It turns out that somehow the button I created for the task somehow was screwed up. I had recreated the animation stuff at least 7 times and each time I got the wrong results. (Animation played backwards, when it was not being told to do so)

My wife jumped in and just created a new button and linked it up to the animations and everything worked fine. So, re-styled her button like mine, and removed my button, and that completes the scene.

I have spent more time trying to solve this one stupid thing than I've spent on the rest of the game (which is very near to completion now) and it was nothing I did wrong, nothing I could have done to change it, just a stupid fluke in Unity 5's wonderful new UI system. Go figure!

Pitch Experiment on Unity

I've decided to focus on developing the experimental project named Pitch with Unity 5 instead of using libgdx. This takes the project into several new fields for me, with using Unity 5 for developing a game, using Unity on android, and putting Unity Ads into a game. I'm not expecting much, but hoping for the best.

That said, I will be putting up some dev progress of Pitch and Flip16 soon. It's been a hectic past few days, and I haven't had as much available time for development as I'd like to have. Today for example was spent away from the office, so pretty much nothing got done... stupid need for groceries and all that...sigh

Experiment (Pitch) States

Here is a simple diagram showing the different 'states' that the Pitch game can be in at any one time. The notation I am using here has primary and secondary states shown. Second states have the primary state and two colons then the secondary state name.

Pitch Game States

The game should start in the Splash state, then progress to the Title state, then to the Play state, which then has 3 secondary states which the game will transition through, before returning back to the Title state.

The game will eventually become more complex once we add Credits, and Social Integration states, but this will suffice for now.

Starting an experiment

Last night I ran across someone making a joke post with an image attached which was nothing more than a solid black rectangle. The comments (d)evolved into additional jokes about how it was really a new AAA game with all black textures and what was being shown was an in-game screenshot of it in action.

This got the wheels in my head spinning and I thought, well, why not make an actual game that was all black? And so, I am starting the development of a small game for android devices which features all black textures as an experiment to see how playable, and how many people play such a game.

Now, this may sound completely absurd I know, but I think it will be fun, and educational. So if you care to learn more. Stick around. I will be posting more about this experiment and it's development over the next few days/weeks that it takes to bring this game to market.