Gushing About: Yoshi's Story

     Yoshi's Story was the first game I've ever played. It was incredible. It made me into who I am today by introducing me to a new form of entertainment. Video games became my favorite thing to do. Video game characters became the ones I cared about most. Drawing pictures of video game characters led to me making comics about them to share with my classmates. That triggered the creative drive fueling my fiery passion that burns today. Today, I'm gushing about the game that started it all. Here is Yoshi's Story.

DragCore's IAP Pop-Ups

    I have pop ups in DragCore that will hopefully boost profit a bit. There are 3 of them and they appear only one time each. They come up when the player is able to max out their crystal total by buying the biggest IAP pack available. When the player passes 99 minus the number of crystals in an IAP, the button never appears again. If the player buys something or dismisses the prompt it doesn't appear again until the crystal counter reaches the next milestone.

DragCore Tutorial Pop-Ups

     DragCore needs some kind of instructions for new players explaining things that may cause frustration if one has to figure it out for themselves. People generally skip through instruction screens (as I learned from watching people play my other games) and making a gradual hidden tutorial for DragCore can only go so far. There are just a few mechanics that need to be explained.

    For that purpose I made a few images that pop up in the early levels of the game before the level starts. Only one will appear per level and only on certain levels that would need explanation. They are timed to disappear after 4 seconds or can be dismissed by tapping the screen, a natural action for people who want something on screen to go away. You can see the tutorial images below.

Using Multi-Touch in DragCore

     One of the things I wanted to try out in DragCore was multi-touch. Main features of the game requires at least two separate fingers on screen to play. I thought it would be a complex problem due to the way I coded input up to this point. It turns out Unity has always supplied a simpler method that I never bothered to look for until now. It's a simple Input.GetTouch(number) method. Proof that I still have lots to learn from making DragCore.

    In TriGrid I used raycasts (invisible arrows going straight down to collide with game objects) and invisible objects representing fingers. In Candy Shop Catch I only used 2D Toolkit's built in button controls. Now with DragCore, touchscreen input is much simpler and I feel a bit silly for going to such great lengths before. Using multitouch will be much easier for me in the future now.