Updates on the Kickstarter launch and progress on the Unity client.
This week saw the launch of the Kickstarter campaign. We are seeking to raise $11,000 to accelerate the completion of the client. Thanks to Eric S, Eric M, and John B for their generous donations! You can check out the campaign page here: http://kck.st/1LTthng
I made great strides with the Unity client this week. I continued to clean up some old code and added quite a bit of functionality, including two new army screens:
The background image is going to be re-worked so it is during the day but the bones are in place. The second screen handles all the functions on the right (Training, Movement, Disbanding). The challenging aspect of this screen was simply scrolling the panels and the added complexity of having 3 of them. Fortunately, I found a great video tutorial on Unity's site which had step by step instructions on how to complete it. There may be some minor tweaking but overall I'm very happy with the results:
One of the advantages of using a tool like Unity is built in functions to aid in development. One of the key ones I found this week was "PlayerPrefs". This class allows you to store information, such as name and password, on a devices local storage and retrieve it later. In just three lines of code, I had this information stored and could easily retrieve it. When I was writing the reference client in VisualStudio, I used a file based mechanism and had to open/close the file, write the data, etc. While learning Unity has been challenging at times, items like this offset some of it. Thank you Unity development team!
One odd thing which has happened is my HP Slatebook 2 is no longer rendering the images in the game (they appear all black). At first I thought this was an issue with the build but I found an Android test site (cloud.testdroid.com) and the game plays fine there (slow, but good for a simulation). I'm still investigating this one.
On the server side, I made two small changes. One was to remove parenthesis included in a message sent to clients. This was a legacy behaviour, as the server was trying to format for text based clients. The second change has to do with attack time. Previously, you could only attack once every 15 seconds. This was meant to give defender's time to react. However, the timer was based on the attacker and not the defender! This meant that as a defender I could be attacked 10 times in a row, by different players, leading to the dreaded "ganking". Now, defender's have some time to react.
Follow the journey on Facebook or Twitter. Until next time, I hope to see you in the game.
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