Level Up!

It's been awhile since I posted last, and I'm sorry about that. I've been a bit busy with far too much. From choosing what direction that I want to go in with the studio, to working out details on my project, to finding freelance work, and to the reason for this update...I have finally jumped in the deep end and committed myself to learning blender, and it's going quite well much to my surprise.

Anyone who has known me for a really long time knows that I have always been a hater against blender for numerous reasons, mostly the unconventional UI, and the crazy usage of keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and because it was "limited" in it's capabilities.

I WAS WRONG. SO WRONG. SO DAMNED WRONG I WISH I COULD GO BACK IN TIME TO SLAP MYSELF AND LEARN HOW WRONG I WAS.

Blender is by far the easiest to use 3d package I have ever touched. It is also the most comprehensive and complete package, and the best part about it is that it is 100% fully and totally legally F. R. E. E., that's right, I said FREE! And it's available for all major operating systems, so that means whether you use Windows, Linux, or Mac, you have access to this incredible software.

Now, the UI is indeed unconventional, yes, but this is actually a good thing. I wish more software worked the way that blender does. The manner in which the panels and controls are interacted with is far superior to anything I have ever used before. Take the hour or so that it takes to learn how to use the UI in blender and you will no longer think it to be a hindrance to the use of the software.

The keyboard shortcuts are indeed there, and some are downright crazy. I'm looking at you, you W-Key Specials menu! But it's actually pretty easy to use them once you learn them. It's worth the hour it will take you to learn the shortcuts. Here are a few of them to get you started.

In the 3D view in Object Mode:

Press the A key to select or de-select all objects in the scene.

Press the X key to delete the selected objects.

Press the G key to grab the selected objects allowing you to freely translate (move) them. Use this in addition to the X, Y, and Z keys to restrict translation to a specific axis.

Press the R key to rotate the selected objects freely. You can use the same axis restriction keys to your advantage here as well.

Press the S key to scale the selected objects freely. Same as the grab and rotate tools, use the restriction keys to have sensible scaling on an axis.

Press Shift+A key to bring up the Add menu. From here you can add things to your scene.

Press the Tab key to switch to Edit Mode.

That's all that I have time to list. Learn more by checking out blender for yourself! Below are some things I made with blender (the tree I modeled with Wings3D before learning blender) and have put into Unity for a quick turntable.

Patching Pitch

It's not so much fun to find that you overlooked things in the production build of a game. And that typically means you're left with no choice but to scramble to patch things up. I've issued 3 patches for Pitch so far. Hopefully I don't find any more things that need patched up. The whole process is pretty irritating, and repeating it is even worse.

In other news, I'm searching for a market for my HTML5 casual mobile game which is finally finished and through beta, and I have gone through and fixed up the reported bugs and balanced the gameplay to the point where I am calling the game done. I've contacted a couple places so far, but no responses just yet. If you have any great recommendations on how to profit from a mobile-ready HTML5 game, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

into the Pitch on Google play Store

For all you users with android devices that can access the Google play Store, you can download and install our latest release, into the Pitch right now.

Get into the Pitch now.

Android AppStore users will need to wait a day until the game is available there. I will make another blog post once the game is available on the Amazon AppStore.

The Darkness Shall Take You

into the Pitch mobile marketplace graphic

It's done. Finally. I just finished the process of putting Pitch on the Google Play store and the Amazon App store. I will post links on this blog to the store URLs once the game has finished going through it's review/submission process.

Until then, you can simply enjoy the gameplay video I created using Open Broadcaster Software, PowerDirector, and Unity 5.

Pitch is Done

Well, almost. The development of Pitch is done. Now comes the not-fun-at-all part of being an indie game developer... The preparation of play store marketing materials, uploading of the apk, and the actual marketing campaign itself.

But for now, I need a bit of a breather. Going to work on freelance stuff and my AxonoxA project probably until Monday; Then I will start the grueling process of distribution and marketing of Pitch.

Pitch Update

I finished up the Game Over Scene for Pitch, a handful of Animations, a few UI components, and a single C# script to drive things, and I'm rather happy with how it turned out. This being screenshot Saturday, I tried to record a video of the scene to put up here, but apparently my recording software isn't up to the task.

Oh, here is an idea... I'll try using my android tablet to take a video of my monitor... won't be quality video, but it might work...

Hey, cool! That worked out better than I expected. Well, that is my progress for the day. Ignore the 0 meters of the Final Depth... that actually updates when this scene is reached from the main game. Since I was simply playing the scene in Unity, the depth counter was not updated.

Loading Ass

Such a stupidly funny name, Assimp or, the Open Asset Import Library is a fantastic little utility which I just successfully integrated into my AxonoxA project. Now I can load up any models I create without having to worry about the little details like tessellating faces before exporting, or exporting to an incorrect format. It works really quick (faster than my previous hand-rolled OBJ loader) and handles multiple meshes and mesh hierarchy (which AxonoxA does not at this time. All meshes are compiled into a single mesh in AxonoxA.)

With my goal reached for the day, it is now time shift gears back to my windows machine and Unity so I can work on Pitch some more!

Recovery

Well that was not a fun time. We here at Bang Bang Attack Studios are finally back on our feet again, and I put in some work on Pitch last night, and worked on the main Play scene a bit, and got the majority of the mechanics implemented. During my recovery I also went through an Intro to Modern OpenGL tutorial series and learned some things that have been eluding me for years, so that's cool. Time to try to catch up with some of my freelance stuff that has fallen behind this past week.

Break

I took today off from working on things to celebrate my anniversary with my wife a day early, since we had to go out of town today anyway for some errands.
I also put filled out my profile on indigodirectory to try to win a Macbook Pro. Fingers crossed!

Yesterday I got some decent progress with Pitch done. I finished up the Title and Main Menu scenes, and started to work on the Play scene. Very pleased with this iteration. It's even better than the first. I plan to jump back in with Pitch development tomorrow, but for now, bed time.

Pitch Update

I've been working on Pitch off and on since I got up today, and  have been making decent progress. This post will be short compared to my last one, as I don't want to spend a lot of time writing it so I can get back to Pitch. :D

Splashing Around

In the final 2 hours last night before I headed to slumberland, I managed to rework all the assets for Pitch, and build the Splash Scene over from scratch, and I think that it turned out pretty well. I am going to give a quick rundown/tutorial on things here both to add more non-rant content to my blog, and to have it as a reference for myself for future projects. :D

First things first, I auto-cropped all of my texture pieces individually with GIMP, leaving me with a folder of images which I then tossed into CodeAndWeb's TexturePacker Pro (Which is worth every penny for the Pro license!) and exported a Unity - Texture2D sprite sheet and packed PNG texture file.

Then I grabbed the TexturePackerImporter C# script from the Unity Asset Store. It's available for Free, and simplifies the process of getting your sprites into Unity greatly. Once I had the TexturePackerImporter.cs file in my Unity Project under the Editor folder, I was then able to drag in my sprite sheet and packed texture files (textures.tpsheet and textures.png) right into my Assets and the TexturePackerImporter script went to work and sliced up the packed textures into nice little sprites for me to use in Unity. Excellent. HUGE time-saver.

The last iteration of this project I had sliced my textures manually, and it took me a couple hours to do. This iteration took me all of 3 minutes, and that time was mostly for my LAN folder browsing! Thank you to CodeAndWeb GmbH!

Now, with the sprites in my Unity project,  I now started with a fresh scene, and added a UI Image to my project which adds in the Canvas and EventSystem objects which are necessary to drive things with the new Unity UI.

Next, I dragged my splash sprite from my imported assets into the Image Component's Source Image field and clicked on the Set Native Size button to quickly set the Rect Transform's dimensions to my source image's dimensions.

Then I opened the Animation window with Ctrl+6 and clicked on Add Property button and added a key frame to the Image.Color property, and then tweened the Color.a property from 0.0 to 1.0 to fade in, then a few seconds later in the animation, a tween from 1.0 to 0.0 to create a fade out.

At this point, all I need to do (and have not done yet) is toss a new Script on my Main Camera and use a Coroutine to wait the duration of my animation and then call Application.LoadLevel to load in my next scene. And Boom, my Splash Scene is complete.

(The Splash Scene in Pitch is actually more complicated than this, but the same techniques shown here were used for all the elements. I'm just using several animations and Images in the Pitch Splash Scene)

Programming takes time

Pitch progress went to the back burner again as I spent most of today working on some in-house tools to help make my freelance art jobs go a bit easier. I've got a lot of stuff that needs to be done, and I haven't had the right tools to get the job done without a lot of trouble, hence the need for specialized tools.

Lots of Ruby scripting has taken place today. Far more than I had planned, and time just flew by. I'm maybe 30% done with the first of a set of tools, so it looks like Pitch will have to wait a bit longer. I wish I could clone myself and work on multiple projects simultaneously without worrying about if it were done or not.

Friday the 13th

Well, the infamously superstitious day has struck me down. In the process of adding the settings menu screen to Pitch, somehow the planets aligned and virgins were sacrificed and the rest of the screens stopped functioning correctly! And to make matters worse, I've learned that I need to restructure things globally throughout the game to accommodate the needs of handling sound and music volumes separately. So, it's pretty much back to the drawing board for Pitch. The beta will have to wait a bit longer. Looks like I am back to a blank slate once again. I've got some kinda luck...

Premature Pitch

Well, okay maybe I was a bit too hasty. I realized that I forgot an entire menu screen in the game, and so I've been working on fixing that today. I am considering giving TestFairy a try for my little beta test, which will begin as soon as I finish adding in the missing settings menu screen!

Pitch Beta

Well, today I got Pitch from alpha to beta. I've got everything in-place, now it's time for a tiny beta test. Nothing complex, just contact me if you want to test the game out, I will send you a build of the game, you install it, play it, and then just answer a couple questions, like did you like the game? Would you play the game? Would you tell others about the game? Simple.

Requirements are that you have an android device, and that you have the ability to install APK files to your device locally (so not from any app store)

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

Unity 5 is out!

Well, I watched the live GDC launch event thing for Unity 5 on youtube today and I am really looking forward to trying out the new Unity 5. I am downloading and installing it now. Going to probably be moving Flip16 dev to Unity 5.

Missed a day! Well, sort of...

My crazy sleep schedule has once again become so crazy, that I completely missed being able to post on the 2nd. So a short recap of progress of Flip16.

I managed to figure out what was needed to finish up the main menu scene. Now it's on to designing the level select scene.

I will create a micro-tutorial on how to create a menu scene in Unity using the new UI soonish, and post it up here.