Month: October 2023
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Little Over A Month In

It’s been just a little over a month since I put my other project on hold and jumped in to start cribbage for the game table. It bugs me a bit that the other project is soo close to completion, but sometimes the break is good. It’s given me some time to rethink a few choices and I am going to redo something that’s bugged me from the start, the tokens.. 

But I digress, In just a little over a month cribbage is almost done. With selecting custom backgrounds to twelve different custom cribbage boards, with 4 lanes on each one.. to 24 different AI generated voice tracks to choose from for scoring out loud.. Player names are in along with a rudimentary tracking system based on names of games won, skunks, etc. I have a few tweaks to put in for the player select so that you don’t have to type your name in over and over, but it will store the last used name for that position as a shortcut.. 

Game wise, most of it is done. The pegging phase is almost done, as that’s the most complex in all actuality, the second phase counting your hand with the cut card is easy, the scoring is already done, its just a matter of the animations and displays.. Pegs are already moving around the boards and can already determine when they hit 121, or when they’re skunked.

Everything is shaping up beautiful for a project I’ve only been working on for less than 60 days, and I actually think it will be done before that 60 day mark. Which will be great, because we can get it into beta testing and get it published in time for the holiday season sales! It may only have30-45 days on the market so I want to give it as much time as I can.. I still don’t know what I want to retail for, but 5.99 kinda sounds good right now. Later after i resolve some other issues on hand, I can come back and add connected play to this and go for round 2.. 
Development Work

Designing Cribbage Boards.. #%^!$@!

Designing cribbage boards sucks.. End of story…

So, first comes the task of finding proper templates to work with for some of the more common designs. Then spend several hours using those templates to draw out individual boards, and drawing out 4 colored tracks for each board. Then, you have to draw the outlines, and make sure you have some sort of guide so the holes are spaced evenly on the board.

Now that you’ve spent multiple hours doing that, Paint Shop Pro crashes, and claims it doesn’t have enough memory to even save your file.. ugh.. so another hour to reproduce those last changes.. And that is JUST the images!

Next up comes importing those images into Unity and then the painstakingly long process of placing everything. You might not think it’s much, but to achieve a consistent look and feel across all of the boards, you have to individually align and place all the holes.. Each hole is it’s own separate gameobject.. Oh yes.. What does that mean to you if you don’t Unity? It means I get to spend hours placing 520 individual objects on each board, across a total of 13 boards, meaning a total of 6,760 hand placed items.. Minimum of 2-3 hours per board.. yeah.. 

But hey, the way this is set up I don’t have to worry about anything with gameplay, the game knows where each hole is, and can automatically move the pegs properly to their next location, so it’s worth it in the end! I hope…

Now let’s hope I can live up to this and get this released by November like they asked! It should make a great bonus check in January for sure if I can get it done!

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