Mobile Gaming Class Project Switch

     I woke up this morning and realized something pretty big. If I can get Unicorn Quest done by December, I'l be able to start my next RPG in the Spring 2015 semester. That's when I plan on taking my Mobile Game Development course. After talking with the professor of the class I found out that we are allowed to develop our games with Unity and even sell those projects on app stores with absolute ownership.

    Instead of making the platformer game I had in mind, I can work towards a working battle engine for my turn-based pony RPG. I can turn in a PvP focused version of the game for a grade and work on the story mode and balancing all of next summer. This is much more exciting for me than forcing myself to make a platformer when I'm clearly dying to start this RPG. Either I'll make the platformer later, or put it on my list of skipped projects.

     This switch has got me thinking about all the extra help I can get from the school by putting those resources to use in a project I'm feverishly passionate about. I'll be forced to do presentations for a grade and I'll be demonstrating the game at open house events. I'll get to show the game off at the next BYOC and I can do follow-up research on it for my Game Analysis course (and it's presentations) the semester afterwards. The more I think about it, the better it sounds.

    With all that to look forward to, it's important to go back to putting everything I've got into my current labor of love: Unicorn Quest. My next few games depend on the foundation I build with this one.

Equica Overworld ~ From Scene to Shining Scene

     Travel between rooms in Unicorn Quest is pretty straightforward. Each door is labeled with a number that matches the door at which Clover will appear when the next scene loads. Doors are colliders on the ground that take you to the loading scene when touched. The loading screen only exists to cover up any lag that would happen if the game chugs on destroying the current scene prefab and bringing up another.

      My Door Script allows me to edit which door leads to where. Even allowing me to change in-game for any maze puzzles I come up with. This will even allow me to use the same room multiple times (like the lost forest in Zelda) which is exactly what the room above is going to be like. Door A in one room leads to door A in another room while behind the scenes a Global tracker is matching hidden numbers with region names to know which room to pull up.

      Consider this major component of the game completed.

Audio, Not My Favorite

Adding sound really makes the game world feel three dimensional.
It's just that making it all is kinda tedious.

     I'm learning more about myself all the time. I now have a deeper understanding of exactly how much I don't like working on audio. When I'm searching for the right combination of bleeps & bloops with Bfxr, I don't feel the same passionate force I do when I'm drawing sprites or writing code. I'd honestly rather just have all the sounds available to me so I can just place them where they need to be. Editing things until they sound right then editing them again in Audacity feels like a lot harder for me than it really is.

    It's just my weakness presenting itself. There's no way I can handle audio on my own far into the future. Hopefully as this project comes to an end, I'll have someone willing to cover sound on board and I'll actually have money to pay for the help.

    Anyway, all of the sounds and music for stuff in the current build is in place. Back to adding features now.

Starting Unicorn Quest Audio

     Using tactics mentioned in other audio posts, I've been chipping away at the tunes and sounds of Equica. I want to do a combination of realistic sounds and 8 bit sounds in an interesting way. If you shoot a fireball you'll hear cackling flames and the initial whoosh but you'll also hear an 8-bit explosion as the fireball comes out and when it hits a wall. Hard to explain, easy to hear.

    As far as the music goes though, there's placeholders from other games for now. I'll try to match the mood I'm going for so that later on, when the game looks way more impressive, I can show it to people who may be interested in my grand plans for releasing the soundtrack separately from the game and splitting the revenue between all the music creators like this team did.

     So for I have one guy on music but I might be able to get extra help when the game looks more complete and word spreads. I'd like to find people I can work with during future projects. If I can get off the ground now, I can start simply hiring or contracting folks when I make Yotes Games a company.