Wow, two months since the last update. Well, the last update I actually published to the blog – I’ve had about a half dozen posts I’ve started but never finished because the things I was writing about changed before I was finished. And because I wanted to add pictures I never got around to grabbing. So this post is going to sum up everything from those half-finished posts.
I spent a lot of time last month tweaking things, figuring stuff out, and updating graphics. It was a good month of work, and resulted in most of the frustrating bugs being fixed.
Toward the beginning of this month, I sent links to a few friends to start getting some feedback. As expected, the feedback has been extremely valuable. The in-game UI has changed to something that works much better – something between the new and old UIs. I created a series of help screens based on feedback about what confuses people. I also got the idea to create a map for the sole purpose of testing the frame rate when things are hectic, and that one map is the map I play all the time now as I improve things.
A week or two ago I installed BattleGrid to my iPad. It runs, but as of the last version I installed, the controls weren’t working, and the game ran terribly. On my test map, the FPS would drop to 3. Yikes. It’s good that it’s running, though.
Unity also decided to give away their “Mobile Basic” kit, which includes iPhone and Android publishing, so BattleGrid will probably end up on Android tablets at some point. I’d need an Android tablet to test with, so the iOS version will still come first and long before the Android version.
Some of the developers in the Unity Asset Store decided to put their stuff on sale with Unity giving away the mobile kit, so I’ve spent about $200 on development tools to make my life easier. I’ve been pretty pleased with most of what I’ve bought, but there’s a downside… I bought a new UI framework, and I’ve been moving my entire UI over to use the new framework. The framework is fantastic – it’s much more efficient than what I had and much more flexible, but it has taken time to figure out its quirks and how to use it properly. I also got a tool that handles gestures for me, so I’m replacing a lot of my control code with updated code that uses the gesture framework.
My productivity has also suffered because Mass Effect 3 was released and I’ve spent a ton of time playing it.
So, I might not hit my PAX deadline for having something playable… I’ll see what I can get done this weekend and next and cross my fingers.
I’ll also try to post some more updates soon about the changes I’ve made.