Sunday, September 6, 2015

Some progress for Catch a Falling Star

I am very happy to report that we're making excellent progress on Catch a Falling Star! Our plan is to have a playable alpha version available for the public to test very soon - within a week or two.

The main platform we'll be using once the game is finished to store stuff like high scores, currency balances and inventory will be PlayFab, but until then we are just going to have a very basic High Score system. We're thinking in the line of simply entering your name after a game and it gets posted to a online server and stored in a MySQL database or something like that.

Luckily, I've already figured out how to do just that, Unity has a really cool WWW class which makes posting data to a website url extremely simple, and getting the result of that back into the game is just as easy.

Then, we had to redo the way the baskets work in the game. Baskets will purely be a cosmetic thing, and one won't be better than the other in terms of game play. But, the little snag we ran into is luckily now sorted. Not all of the baskets have been created equal, they all differ slightly on how they look. To give you an example, this is the default basket that will be unlocked when you first play the game:


Very simple. However, we have some baskets that look a bit different, and don't fit into this "template" for lack of a better word. See this one for example:


The part that catches the star is not in the center anymore because of the cup's ear. So, having each basket as one element wasn't going to do the trick, so we have decided to split them up, and have each one consist out of 5 parts. See here:


This solves our problem, and at the same time also gives us a bit more free reign when it comes to creating new baskets. Basically, the part in the middle is the main section of the basket (or cup in this case hehe). Our various colliders are part of that section, and if the basket happens to have additional parts in the outside, they'll be there, but won't affect anything else except for the aesthetic of it all :)

We had to replace about 3 of them though, but the end results are great!

Also, I added a moon to the main menu screen, just to spruce things up a bit - and it moves wow! It moves slowly across the sky. Here's a short clip demonstrating it, as well as some game play :)

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