Shape Matching Puzzle in Leap Motion — Development Blog —26th October 2016 — Ground Control to Major Tom!
This last 2 months has been a trip, the development progress has been steady, finally the game has a title, along with the theme, and a suddenly implemented gravity in the game because it just looks plain cool!
I guess this might be the last development blog I’m going to do, lets cover all the thing that happen in the last 2 months.
So first of all, I started using GitHub so I can work anywhere without the tedious copy and paste to flash drive. Feel free to drop by and steal the project!
Over there you can check all the progress I had up to this point, the Git also include resources that I hope you won’t steal since the only legal resource you could steal is my code over there.
Around September I actually had a crisis on what the game supposed to be, level making is hard and really bad looking. So, I spend times playing some old 90’s game like Virtua Racing and Daytona USA all the time, then it hit me. What if I just make the level all in low poly flat shaded graphic? Dropping to the Unity Asset Store led me to this asset pack.
Low price? Check.
Lots of variety? Check.
Lightweight? Check.
I instantly bought the pack, and start fiddling a bit with the asset. It turns out all the model uses Unity standard shader, which is great! With little tweak I can modify those models however I want, even giving those materials some transparent coloring.
With that, I start on contacting my best friend nibelungems who said would help me on the asset and level, told him if he could help me on just designing the level that would all be enough. And I glad asking him, he did some superb looking level design. Check this out!
So with that, the level is now being worked by Thomas, we decided to make only 16 levels, divided by 4 theme or chapter or whatever which can be selected via this magical looking main menu.
Made those menu in 3 days, not finished yet as you can see by the button still looks empty, but later it’ll be filled with the level preview which will make the menu more sweet!
I also tweaked some part of the game, with consultation by sociopathyc he helped tweaked the game engine to enable movement in gravity physics, along with that also helps with the camera control which really troubles him much. At first the camera would be controlled by gesture. But along with making the gesture is really hard, and its looks inefficient, I decided to change the idea of controlling the camera with a DualShock 4 controller.
While its not much, the game now mainly control on the DS4. Camera is controlled with the left stick analog (might also add the right stick for lefties), Trigger is for restarting, shoulder button for calibration, and Option button (that start button) is for exiting the game. Now the game feels more engaging, although I’m not sure if this would led to a better experience.
So along all that I also already progressed on my report, so far it has been Chapter 3 Part 2, still need to go another 3 part before going to Chapter 4, and then Chapter 5. I only have 3 weeks before I have to throw this in, hopefully I can make it by that.
And to be honest, that’s all. There’s so much improvement that I forgot to update you guys with this. I recently re-read the log, shows how much I can do this game development with my friends, and finally come to almost end. Maybe later I’ll have another log with the game download in case you guys wanna try it.
Thanks, this is Major Tom to Ground Control.
