Shuffa Brick game released.

I've just released Shuffa Brick my new physics based Break out game on Google Play.

Shuffa Brick is a new physics based Break-out style game, except you do not use a paddle to hit the ball. You touch the screen slide then release.

Clear all bricks to complete the level.

Shuffa Brick can be played with just the touch of one finger. 

You touch the screen of your phone or tablet, slide back and release. 

This will rebound the ball in the opposite direction. 

See how you rank on Google play leader board.

Unlock all achievements.

One level only included, let me know if you want me to create more.

YouTube trailer for Shuffa Brick

Shuffa Brick juicy style

In the new game I'm writing, Shuffa Brick, I had each level start with all bricks already in place, functional but a bit dull to look at. After watching another great YouTube video on Juicy game design, I decided to add a bunch of the juicy effects described in the video.

 Juice it or lose it

Animate the bricks coming onto the screen

In the video I saw they used an animation curve to provide the location that the brick should be. So given a ratio of time along the x axis, this will give you a ratio along the y axis for how far it is from the destination, the cool thing is that this can be further than the destination as in my example below, so it gives a little bounce effect.

 my brick curve

If we want the total journey time to be 1 second then after 0.25 secs in according to the curve we will have traveled 50% of the way to the final destination (calling curve.Evaluate(timeGap) would return 0.5 for the y axis value).

Fancy particle effect on the ball

Next thing I added was a particle effect on the ball, the idea is that it leaves a flame like trail behind the ball.

To do this I changed the Color over lifetime going from yellowy to orangish color with a alpha fade.

Explosion effect on the brick

Then an explosion effect when a brick gets destroyed. This is another particle effect to do this I set the same color over lifetime as the ball. I add speed and a gravity modifier to give it the effect.

Comparison Non Juicy vs Juicy

Re-using Unity 2D animations by changing the Sprite at run-time.

In my new game Shuffa brick, I have a number of same sized bricks that I want to animate once and re-use the animation for all colours of the bricks.

I created the animation using a green brick, then in the editor I changed the sprite renderer to use a different coloured sprite.

The change works in the editor, but when running the game it reverted back to the green brick.

In code I tried updating the sprite of the renderer in the Update() of the GameObject but that didn't work either. In the debugger I could see it getting changed but again it went back to the Green brick at run-time.

So in effect what happens is that the animator overwrites whatever sprite we set in code with the one in the animation.

Unite 2014 - 2D Best Practices In Unity

I watched a really good video on YouTube, the important part is where he talks of Sprite animation re-skinning. All I needed from the video was just one word LateUpdate (31mins in). The code in the LateUpdate() is ran after the animator has done it's work. So if we change the renderer's sprite at this moment it stays changed.

Brick animations with LateUpdate()

NoTilt pinball

I released Rhino Roll my previous game on the 18th December 2015, I then set myself a target to release a new game by the end of the year.

Rhino Roll get it on GooglePlay

My new game is called NoTilt pinball and relies heavily on my 1st game Shuffa ball's mechanics. 

NoTilt Pinball get it on GooglePlay

Here it is like a traditional pinball game with bumpers, triggers and slingshots. The one thing missing is the flippers. You use the table itself to control the ball. Watch the trailer video to see it in action.

Creating a video game trailer using Movie Maker

To get your game noticed a lot of people say you need a trailer video for your game. I don't know if that is true but here is how I went about making the trailer.

Rhino Roller trailer

To do that I used Movie maker for editing, Open broadcast software (OBS) for the screen capture and Spriter and Inkscape for the logo animations.

Logo animations

To do the logo I used Inkscape to create PNGs, then in Spriter I created an animation for the logo. Then I exported the animation to multiple PNGs which I then imported into Movie Maker, changed the time to display each frame to 0.1s.

Dragging multiple .PNGs into Movie Maker

Change dsiplay time

Game Play

To capure the game play I used OBS to screen capture. I turned the music off as that will be added later in Movie Maker. I edited multple shots of game play together and added to the main trailer project.

Music

I then added the music from the game itself into the video.


Click here to see the video

Rhino Roll

I've changed the name of Endless roller to Rhino Roll and it is now available for testing on Google Play.
It is a side scrolling platformer game.
To jump deform the ground and use as a trampoline.

http://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.adzl.endlessroller

Here are some screenshots of the game

Adding a Font in Unity

So I was getting ready to release a version of my game Shuffa ball: Endless Roller onto game jolt for play testing. So I decided I needed to have text for the menus, I used a font I found in Inkscape and asked myself am I allowed to release a game using this font.
The font is called Showcard Gothic and it appeared it is not free to use commercially. So I needed to find a new font free to use in an application. I came across the site http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ that contains free to use fonts.
There I found this great cartoony font that fits perfectly with the cartoon style of my game. It is called Pusab and here is a picture of the level complete panel featuring the font.

Pusab font on level complete

In unity to use the font is really simple, just place the PUSAB___.otf file in the assets folder, then when using the text click the select font button.

Select font in Unity

Now I have a full level of the game to play, please play it and leave comments. It still isn't finished but it is getting there.