Month: November 2023
Development Work

Next Projects… Yep with an S

Now that That Cribbage Game is in the hands of the testers.. and then was passed back to me.. then back to them. then back to me. then back to them. then.. well let’s just say it’s always a back and forth process and testers identify things that we as devs, just don’t see, or we saw it so much we just got used to it and it didn’t bother us, or some of these testers are relentless in trying to break things! BUT! That’s a good thing! I’d rather them find these little issues and get them fixed, even if it’s not something a customer would ever likely come across. 

To me, it’s release ready, it’s just a matter of them setting a release date, getting promo videos playing, and setting a price, which i still haven’t decided on yet. Leaning towards 6.49.. I want a little more than 4.99 but at the same time I don’t want to alienate people by going up 8.99 or something. Some people like me, will see a 8 or 9 dollar price point, and I’ll just skip the game because of the cost. 

I’m just hoping for a release to be set, ya know, on my birthday sounds good! Dec 4th.. 

Well, now is time to move forward..  I still have some work to do on CashFlo, but that’s almost done as well, it’s just a few minor AI pieces to work out, and then thats another title out the door for testing.. It’s crazy in what, 15 months I’ll have put out 4 titles? It makes a difference when you see a lifting of the financial burden from doing this. Even as a hobby, it has a pretty high financial investment even when your doing everything yourself, and when there is no return, you slow down a lot.. 

So next up on my agenda, are 2 different projects, the way I work, I get bored.. So 2 projects will allow me to jump back and forth and hopefully reduce the days that I just don’t wanna work on it, because I’m bored or burning out on working on the same thing day after day.. 

First, is a clone of a board game out there.. Haven’t on a title for it yet, but it’s a simple tile based game, laying your tiles down for points and seeing who can score the most.. Some of the potential titles:

 

  • Mine & Dine
  • Gremlins Grotto
  • Dwarf Delve
  • Crystal Caverns
  • Crystal Crunchers
  • Crystal Carvers

Something

OPanico

 

 

The second title, Opanico is a new card game loosely based on another game called Blink.. I was going to do a recreation or Blink, then I just started wandering, and well it turned into it’s own whole game, so.. I have the rules all written out, should be a very fast paced game based on matching colors, shape or numbers, along with the panic.. you’re timed on your turn, and if someone else looks like they might win, well you can ruin their day with a panic, and shuffle everyones cards together, and re-deal… 

So that’s what I’m up to.. Gotta a preference on names for the unknown above? Join us on Discord and talk about it!

 

Join us on discord to discuss!

https://discord.gg/Aw2pZDq
Development Work

Cribbage Final

Well, I think we finally have a final product, at least until I ship it off to the beta team and they start making a giant freaking list of bugs.. But that’s ok! 

There were definitely a lot of issues with this, and it’s not my coding or anything, it’s the low end hardware of the target platform. So in the game, there are 12 different cribbage boards, each one is composed of 5-600 GameObjects.. Nothing major at all there.. I was loading those into an array that the game would then instantiate the board it needed for that game.. Well apparently the IGT hardware can’t handle that.. It worked on every device I deployed it too, so I thought, ok, lets kick this over to the table and test it! And the only thing it did was crash. And of course, Logcat showed NOTHING of value whatsoever.. Basically it just spewed nonsense that didn’t give me any direction to look.

After spending hours and hours trying to rebuild scenes, and rewriting scripts, and stripping everything down to it’s most basic pieces, even at one point removing everything except the images.. no code, no animation, no sound, no voice.. Finally I stumbled on the gameboards.. Figured ok, gotta be memory, removed half of the boards from the array NOT even instantiated objects, and sure enough it starts working.. Sadly I had already completely redesigned the title scene and stripped out the player selection and joining into its own separate scene (which I may put back to the way it used to be).. 

Either way, the damn thing works properly now. Stuck the board prefabs in the resources folder, and loading the prefab from resources at runtime, so as not to hurt the tables tiny little memory feelings.. It runs great now, 45+ fps on average which is fine.. 1 or 2 tiny things to wrap up and do all the marketing pieces for, and I can ship it off. Definitely not going to write an entire game again without testing on the table every step of the way.. not again.. Still don’t understand why it cant handle 6000 objects, that’s a pretty minute number.. but hey.. It’s all good now!

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