Made of Bricks

Greetings fellow raiders!

A Message from Lead Developer Russ:

As we mentioned in the last post, the past two weeks have been focused on migration to Unity 6. One of the things we knew going into this was that our framework thus far had been pieced together in a “get it working, fix it later” fashion- and that wasn’t going to be sustainable moving forward.

With that in mind, we made the decision to build a solid foundation that is robust, flexible, easier to build on top of, and will better suit our needs moving forward. This was one of those choices where the only downside is the time it would take to create. 

And now here we are, knee deep in getting everything laid out properly. Prior to this, we would see problems come up and just find a band-aid solution so we could push forward. Now we have a better knowledge of how to avoid many of those issues through better planning and execution. It’s been amazing to have the time and space to properly nail down and resolve those issues that do come up.

I’m finding a lot of similarities between this and the three little pigs- our first prototype was made of straw and would break if you looked at it sideways. The second was stronger (sticks) but couldn’t hold the weight of what we are trying to build. This iteration is the bricks, and with any luck, we won’t need the steel-beam version.

Previously we had to have a number of band-aids to show the proper UI elements to our players depending on what part of the game they were looking at. Managing turning some things on and other things off (all while making sure it was only happening for the local player, not the other players in the same server) had become a problem for “future-us” to solve. That UI system had become such a house of cards that we really didn’t want to touch it and therefore it never got fixed.

We’re building in fixes and updates across the board, also utilizing some new tools available in Unity 6. My personal favorite is the new Multiplayer Play Mode tool, which lets me spin up 4 different instances of the game straight from the editor. This has vastly improved the time it takes to develop and test multiplayer features because I don’t have to kick off a build or port changes to another machine in order to have more than one instance of the game up.

    Let us know if you want more (or less) tech-type information like this, and we can make it part of our more regular posts!

UI Improvements

Talking about the UI, we’ve been working with parts and pieces without a set for ourselves. Part of this was lacking a cohesive idea, the other was not being able to find any UI elements others had made that would work with our ideas. 

Clean and functional!

The concept for the play area is a hand-held device, similar to a phone, but with steam-punk and wind-punk elements instead of digital and circuits. Within and around this device are buttons like keys on a typewriter, as well as displays to show your current rating, and progress towards your next rank, chat and chat controls, as well as powerups and other information. Our list for this was quite long. Russ was excellent in getting my ideas edited down to something less messy and visually quicker to understand

On a computer screen, there is plenty of room for all of this. Even on the smallest screens, there is more than enough room for all the elements I wanted to show. However on a phone, there is much less space, and the elements themselves have to take up more of it to be usable. The biggest thing that I noticed was that there was little to no room on the sides of most phone games. Many have the play area go almost to the last pixel side to side and have all the elements above and below. However, these rarely need more elements than a score, a goal, and a pause button. We needed more. 

So after combining both the aesthetic we wanted and the elements we required it was tough to find anything close to what we were looking for. I set about combining several parts from a lot of different GUI builds until it was looking good, if disjointed. Then came the several-day process of re-coloring, re-texturing, and editing all the elements until they felt like they belonged together. Now we have a solid base for all our future UI elements. 

Each puzzle will have similar elements, but also a few unique ones. For example, Hydro and Sailing both have definite ends. Once you clear the goals the board goes away and a new one is presented. Others like Gunnery or Sword fighting will not see a second board to work with, there will only be one. 

I am scaling back on the first publish of the Hydro puzzle as well in order to get it out and tested sooner. Trying to remember the motto of 'prototype fast, and fail early'. The first release will start with one game mode. We will be focusing on bringing the other puzzles to publish before coming back and doing a second pass. That way we`ll have sorted a lot of bugs and elements before adding them together into the main game. 

The foundations are the heaviest to move so they`re the most important to put effort into now. But we said going in, we want to do this right.

    Sorry for all the construction talk, here’s a brick: