Unity – Page 3 – David Ball's blog

BotSumo game almost finished!

I think I’ve only written about this BotSumo game on IndieDB, (where I’ve been calling it “RoboSumo” – but have decided to rename it because “RoboSumo” is already taken).

Recently I changed it from the light & quite garish colour theme of this:

…to this:

Which I quite like. The colours from this fan poster of “Ready Player 1” inspired me. Also I went full isometric, because isometric is cool (I’ve been collecting this board on Pinterest with images for inspiration).

So the idea of the game is simple, to push the other player off the platform. I’ve introduced pickups too, which make the player slightly larger, and double its mass (the game uses physics objects), making it easier to push the other player.

The controls are dead simple, you have one button to drive the character forward. It spins by default, so it’s about timing. There’s an on-screen button for 2 players, the idea is you grab a friend and play using the same screen, just like the Microbattles Android games.

So I’m about to start uploading it to the Google Play store (which always takes longer than I expect). But after that I’ll need testers. So if you’re interested in testing this game and have an Android phone, submit your email on this form, and I’ll send you an email.

So, Glob is on the Google Play Store! Download it now for no reason

…although don’t get too excited, it’s completely pointless and doesn’t do much.

Although some of the sentences it generates can be quite amusing. And you can check back periodically to see other stupid stuff that he might have been doing.

I’ve blogged several times about Glob, read those if you’re interested in the progress. But for now lets just focus on the fact I’ve finished something. In my spare time and everything!

Get it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.DavidDickBall.Glob

From Beta to Production

After testing on a few devices (I still haven’t found a better way than actually having those devices though, which is quite limiting) I pressed the button that promotes the latest version into the app store. Yes, the actual Google play app store!

This means people could find my game and download it!

I can’t work out what those people would make of it though, as it’s so pointless. I might get some low ratings. Or I might get nothing at all. I assume there’s some sort of Google algorithm for what apps get shown at the top of the list, and without any likes or reviews or downloads I assume mine will be very low down.

If you’d be kind enough to rate, that would be very nice but don’t worry about going overboard, I know it isn’t exactly 5/5 material!

Anyway this was a bit of research to see what the entire process was like, and tbh it was pretty easy, and I’ve written down some things I need to remember, so it’s an unglorified success, so… on with the next project!

My problems with percentage layouts in Unity

In my latest app (mostly just to test interface, and the experience of the Google app store) I’m having problems scaling an image based on a percentage of the screen.

Not all phones have the same resolution or aspect ratio

This is obvious right? So I wanted my interface to scale to all types of aspect ratios. Here’s what I wanted it to look like:

So to test, I’ve been creating a build and emailing to myself to open on my phone (Nexus 5). And what I found was that Glob’s eyeball was being scaled a bit too big:

I’m not actually sure why this is happening because I thought I’d got this figured out. The bounding box that Unity allows you to draw around each item for scaling, I thought was best to be the same as the image boundary. Like this:

Which I also did with the graphic of the eyeball (it’s separate because it’s an animation). Like this:

I made it super wide so it can scale (maybe this is the problem? Not sure, but it seemed to help when I tried the first time).

The above approach looks great in any aspect ratio I can create in the editor. I’ve tried all the example default resolutions and tried a few more but it always looks good. But on a phone… not so much.

I also tried this on a friend’s phone (a Google 1+1) with a much larger resolution screen, and that looks even weirder:

Look at that eyeball!! Not sure why it’s scaled even larger than the other image. Also the text is tiny. It’s supposed to scale to fit the area but hasn’t Perhaps because I set a max size?

I’m continuing to play with this, I uploaded to the Google play store (I wrote about that here) and if you’re interested, you can download it here (currently in Alpha):

https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.DavidDickBall.Glob

EDIT – I think I’ve solved this but not quite sure. I think the problem was the anchors not being exactly flush with the image boundaries, causing scaling differences. I’ve made it more exact, as well as nesting the eye inside the body graphic (why not really), and it seems to work ok now, but needs just a bit more testing.

So I’m uploading something to the Google Play store

New game

To call it a “game” is a bit misleading. This latest project is more of a random gibberish generator, something I wanted to create which was quick and no stress. Although I had the silly idea of showing how long since you last opened the app, which it turns out was a nightmare. I hate anything to do with time. Especially DateTime.

Anyway I called it “What’s Glob been up to?” a random generator that tells you some nonsense that Glob (the little alien blob) has been doing since you last checked. If you check again after just a few minutes it’ll say “Glob has just been doing x” but if you check after an hour, it’ll tell you something a bit more interesting and lengthy.

Testing on my phone

So when the app was mostly finished I exported to my phone. A process I wrote about here. This step actually took a long time of going back and forward, to get the font size correct, and make sure the interface elements scaled as they should. Turns out, the Unity way of doing percentage widths is quite tricky! I longed for CSS (especially flexbox), which makes more sense to me.

Signing up for a Google developer account

This part was easy, and you can do it by going here. It costs $25, which is a bargain compared to the Apple app store account tbh!

After this, I wanted to upload my apk file to the “Alpha” section.

Digital signing

First problem, uploading my app failed.

And that’s because it wasn’t digitally signed. I had no idea about this step, but it’s basically a file you need on your computer with some sort of credentials. Turns out I can use Unity to add this, and I found a YouTube video of this friendly chap which explained how to do it. Pretty easy really.

The most difficult part of that is what to call myself! I don’t have a company, so just used my name. Apparently you’re supposed to keep and use the same file for all your apps. So I’ve kept the file somewhere agnostic from a project.

Ooh it’s uploading now!!!

Entering details

So there’s loads of details you need to enter about the app after it’s uploaded.

Standard stuff, upload an icon, some screenshots, provide description, and even do a content questionnaire, which asks some pretty oddly-worded questions like:

“Flatulence cloud”??!!!

“Poo coils”?!!!

Nope. This project doesn’t have any of those.

No it doesn’t!!! And why are they singling out the Nazis? What about all the other totalitarian evil dictatorships? Are they allowed?

So in the end I got these ratings:

So the last thing I needed to do was upload icons for every one of their specific aspect rations which was a bit annoying. I know it’s nice to give me the control, but can’t they just resize them?!

The last one is a bit odd:

I don’t think I want this working on a TV. It’ll look pretty crap if it did. It’s made for a portrait aspect ratio. Good thought though, how can I make my app work in both aspect ratios? I haven’t found an alternative to media queries yet.

Alpha/Beta etc

So you can choose to put the app into alpha or beta before publishing. As I’ve no idea I chose alpha, also because I want to see the full extend of the process!

Then I pressed publish.

Scary stuff!

Now to wait a bit for it to be approved…

Exporting a sprite sheet from Flash into Unity animation

I didn’t even realise Unity had an animation timeline until recently, in my Space Turd project I used scripts to time things appearing on screen – when actually I could have made it easier for myself by using tweened animations, something I love in Flash.

Flash is still my favourite tool for drawing and animation though, so for this new project (which currently I’m just calling “Glob”) I wanted to animate the character of Glob to blink and look from left to right.

So I animated this in Flash, and I was happy with it. It’s so nice to use Flash’s timeline again, it’s been too long! And it’s super easy!

Now to move this into Unity

I thought this bit would be where it gets difficult. What I didn’t know until recently though is that you can export a spritesheet from Flash, which is more of an industry standard for games. It puts all your animation onto one image.

If you right click the movie clip containing the animation you can select “Generate sprite sheet”, which exports a file like this:

You might not be able to see the white above, as the background is transparent.

Then in Unity you can load this as a sprite (putting it into a folder called “Sprites” automatically converts it. Then you have to tell Unity how to split this file up into it’s different frames.

First I selected “Automatic” but it for some reason wanted to merge the first 2 frames, so had to select the 2nd manually. Which wasn’t difficult, just making sure it’s the same width and height as the others.

Animation in Unity

So I opened the animation window, and got a familiar timeline. It looks similar to Flash but works probably more like animation in 3DsMAX. There’s a record button, and changing any property of the object is recorded. So I dragged it to 30 seconds, swapped the sprite for the “blinking” frame, and saved it.

Unity creates an Animation file which saves in your project. It also saves an “Animator” file. Not sure what this is yet, but I deleted it and the entire animation was deleted, so it’s essential! Here’s the contents:

I’ll post more info about this “Glob” project here. But in the meantime, here’s the repo on GitHub.

My 1st & 2nd games built in Unity

I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time recently creating a Unity 3D game. I’m still very much a beginner at the platform, and each game I work on feels like the first. I’m still learning, but getting faster with each project.

The latest project has taken me months already, fitting it in around work and other commitments.

But I’m not going to write anything about that yet (okay that’s a lie, I’ve written plenty about that over on IndieDB already – click here), because I haven’t yet blogged about the games I created first.

The 1st game – ReTardis

Because I was a total beginner, I started on a ridiculous project that wasn’t to be taken seriously at all (hmm, that sounds familiar, this applies to my 2nd & 3rd attempts too!).

I did add it to Newgrounds though, you can play it in the browser – click here.

The 2nd game – Starbug Thruster

Starring the spaceship from Red Dwarf, one of my favourite comedies as a teenager, this game was based on the physics used in my previous game, but simplified for mobile touch interface. You only have to touch the left or right of the screen to thrust up and in a direction.

I loved making this game, and based the story around Blue Dwarf, the text-based game I created many years ago, and which people still play (because it’s awesome, and the most rewarding game you can play).

I spent some time creating it for mobile, although abandoned that idea when I realised using a spaceship which is someone else’s IP isn’t a good idea. I might bring back the idea in a future game though. You can play this in the browser on the Newgrounds website – click here.

The 3rd game – Attack of the mega turd from space

Yes. You read that correctly. This is another ridiculous game. It’s so ridiculous I wrote about it how ridiculous it is here.

Intended to be another silly learning experience, I’ve actually been putting a lot of effort into this game. And I’ve been learning a LOT. I think my next Unity project will be a lot quicker, as I now actually know what I’m doing.

Here’s a sneak peak of the progress:

Okay that screenshot doesn’t actually feature a turd. But there’s more to this game than the title.

I’ll be posting more progress and screenshots on IndieDB – click here.