Progress, and going away for a bit...

Still working on MechCorp obviously. While I'm trying to find some place holder icons. I've come across something rather wonderful - http://game-icons.net/. It's a huge collection of free, game-ready icons. I urge you to go check it out if you ever need some for your project.

By the way, I in the process of making what I can from the what I got. From the collection I downloaded, I pick what I can use and process them a bit to fit the purpose. I simply give it some light color and add some glow effect. It's simplistic at best but I think it's pretty good for what it's. Trying to put them into the game and things has started to look better already. Still, it's a long way to go. Here's what I got so far:

 

I've also start working on another interesting addition, a tech tree. Well, not exactly a tech tree as all the progression is linear. So it's just upgradeable I guess. Dont really plan for any corss-dependency between each branch. I have to say tho, it's pretty good to be able to work on a UI that is tied to a specific design. As oppose to the perk menu in TBTK and TDTK where I've to keep things open and generic. With the new icons in, it's certainly nice to look at.

Finally, a public annoucement that I'm hitting the road again and will be continuing so for the next 2 weeks. So please forgive me if I'm a bit slow in responding to email and stuff.

Status Update (I name thee MechCorp)

It's time for another status update for what I've been up to. I'm quite happy to say I've been quite productive for the past week. My mech game prorotype (which for now on shall be known as MechCorp) is finally taking its first shape and now playable. It still looked pretty rugged to be honest. There isn't much polish done yet. I merely manage to put the core concept in. And there's still a chunk of it missing.

So the big picture of the game is inspired by FTL and Oregan-Trail, the player will be trying to get to one end of a big map to another end. Along the way there will be random event to spice up the journey. The meat of the game tho, is to manage a squad of mechs, engage in turn based combat and try to survive. Imagine X-Com, in this case the player will be able to build their squad composition, customize each mech, manage the pilot leveling and so on. They also choose where to travel, which battle to fight and so on. You'll get the picture looking at this:

The mech can be customized in pretty much several aspects, which should cover most of relevant factor in the battle system. There's weapons, which determine the damage and damage type each attack. Then's there modification components, which can be used to modified the mech's basic stats like HP and dodge chance or even add new abilities. Finally the pilot, which will determine the effectiveness of the mech in battle. Of course, the pilots can also be leveled up after gaining experience in battle, improve their effectiveness, as well as gaining new perks and abilities.

The battle, as I've said in an earlier post, uses TBTK. Although I have to modify it a bit to fit various aspect of the game. Not much tho as the new MechCorp system is designed with TBTK in mind. The biggest difference of course, is each mech can carry at least two weapons and can be switched at any instant to meet different tactical need.

I would very much like to release a demo. However it's still too early in the development. There are simply too many things missing. The art asset, especially icons are none-existent. That makes thing a bit confusing. Also the event system is a bit half-baked so the gameplay is a bit dry. Until I figure everything is a bit more polished, I will hold on to it.

NGUI3 for TDTK and TBTK! Yay!

It has been a rather productive week. I've build 3 GUI solution for TDTK, TBTK in total. Two based on NGUI3 for each TDTK and TBTK, and a default Unity GUI for TBTK. With that done, I'm releasing new update for both TDTK and TBTK. And this will be the only major updates in foreseeable future. Both of them are now live on AssetStore.

New Unity GUI for TBTK

New NGUI3 for TBTK

New NGUI3 for TDTK

Update Log for TBTK v1.0.6:

• added new GUI that is based on NGUI3
• added new GUI that is based on Unity GUI
• added new ability to spawn collectible
• added option to spawn collectible procedurally
• unit has the option to spawn collectible after they are destroyed

Update Log for TBTK v2.2.5:

• added new GUI that is based on NGUI3
• Resource can now be bring forth to the next level
• Platform and overlay mesh has been replaced with more optimized custom plane
• NGUI free no longer throws warning message in Unity4

Happy 2014!

Another year gone by and I'm still here. 2013 has been a pretty decent year. I've played some inspiring games, leaned some stuff, make some stuff... Most importantly, I find myself better equipped to take on more challenging task.

I know I've been talking about making a real game rather than working on endless development of various framework like TDTK. Honestly this has been going on for ages. Too long in fact. So the new year resolution is to get on with it. The project (the wip mech game that I mentioned in an ealier post) has been put in motion. Now I just need to find time to concentrate on it. I might also have some idea for a new toolkit. This one is more complicated at first thought. So it will only happen if I manage to pull it off.

I'm currently working my ass off on adding NGUI3 support for both TDTK and TBTK. It's a hell load of work and I'm trying to get it done asap. But having said that, instead of just porting the existing code and implementation to NGUI3, I'm taking the opportunity to review and redesigning most of it, at least in term of coding structure. The result is a cleaner and easier to maintain code, which should help to keep me sane when I want to do any update in the future. This is especially true for TDTK. The old UI code is so bloated because the idiot who worked on it has the brilliant idea to squeeze all the UI code into a single script. It makes me lost my will to work just by looking at it.

While I'm at it, the visual has been redesigned to be more coherent. I know this is a matter of personal preference but I find the new coherent color scheme much slicker. I've put up a couple of sneak peak in this post. You might notice that I have recycled a lot of the older layout and interaction to save me some effort.

Ideally I would really like to rebuild TDTK from ground up. With that I can clean up and re-organise all the code. Make it cleaner and more mod-friendly. As it's currently, there are quite a bit of messy hack that I put in much later after the first release to accomodate feature that never planned for in the first place. But I'm afraid given the existing feature on the toolkit, that is a herculean task that could easily take months. So just the UI overhaul will have to do for now.

So that's it for now. I hope that after all this, I can concentrate on "the real game"... game. Hope you all have a good year!

p/s: My asset sales on AssetStore are ending 4th of January. So this is the last day!