MA Games Design - Reflective Diary

Yup, it’s me – the guy who hasn’t posted in a while. To all my billions of loyal fans, I’m sorry! I’m still making you some good games though, of course. I’ve not posted much for two reasons – the first being that as far as I know, this is no longer a submission requirement, and the second being that I don’t wish to repeat myself.

As I’m still working in the Unity engine, I’m not doing anything new, but I am instead doing it better. Quicker, sleeker, and nicer looking.

To appease you (My billions of fans.) – I will tell you what I HAVE been earning, what’s new! The brand new little extras to add the sleek awesomeness to both of my games.

Custom Shader

For my Stealth game (Now ‘Bunny Robber’) – the style I wanted couldn’t be achieved from the default materials available in Unity, or even by using the texture.

As such, I created a “Shader” – Essentially a material. Starting with a simple flat shader (A toon shader – A brightly coloured look) I had it so that it would respond to light. (This was so that it would darken to help suit the mood) – Where a flat Toon shade stays its colour no matter what colour the light is, a lighted version would adapt. Next up was the shading – the option was no shading what so ever or hard lines for the shading – but also there was an option within the shader to assign a secondary texture to map the lighting – assigning a subtle gradient here gave my models a soft shade to it, giving them smooth edges.

The final problem was making the shader “Two sided” – some of

the plant life in my level was made from very few polygons, so when rendered with a one sided material, it would not appear as it should. Again, this was solved with a custom shader.

Curve of difficulty

With the skipping game, I changed the demo, in which the rope remained at one speed, the current version has a rope that gets progressively quicker before it settles on a top speed.

The problem with this is that when testing, I had a lot of trouble with a low speed, so when trying out the top speed, while it may have been too difficult for me (Or too easy once I had experience) other people may find it incredibly easy.

Deciding no the top difficulty – and settling on something that is fair (and possible.) but wile still presenting a challenge has been hard, and as such the demo was given to several guinea pigs, and found a difficulty that was suitable.

While the top speed may now be quite possible, and not as hard as I would like it, making it just two frames quicker makes it quite impossible – the rope turning quicker than the character jumps.

Working for a target platform and exporting to iPhone

While the touch screen controls gave me a lot of trouble near the start of the project – Actually exporting it to the iPhone has proven to be a completely different kettle of fish.

Everything from Licencing issues to well… other stuff that I can’t seem to identify to repair.

Each attempt has bought me one step closer to testing the game on the iPhone – I’ve been able to get a simulator working to at least test the graphics scaling and resolution size – but it seems that the world is dead set against it working on the actual iPod touch.


Anyway – That’s enough for now, I’m writing that having just watched all my decorated levels crash in Maya and become unusable. Good thing I had backups!