A Sense of Unity

Hi again, folks--Jamie O here.  When I last left off, I was griping about the enormous amount of reading we've been doing to get a grasp on Android.  That's still ongoing (yay).  After writing out some of the algorithms that I'd have to implement for controlling music and sound streams, as well as creating a game window, map files, proper (smooth) animation, etc, the rest of the developers and myself decided to look to a game framework to speed things up.  We decided on Unity after some deliberation.  We discussed the merits of some of the other game frameworks with other groups, but overall the dev team decided Unity was going to give us the most power for the effort we're going to expend.

A nice benefit of Unity is that we can compile to pretty much any platform out there, meaning we can release as an Android game, a iPhone game, a PC game, a Mac game...  while the scope of the class may call for Android--and that is still our number one priority--the idea of portability is so exciting.

It took very minimal work to the the demo animations Matt L showed me ready for use--TexturePacker has a great built-in algorithm for picking out an alpha color.  I packed him up into a nice sprite sheet and was able to port him into Unity within under a minute.  I've also got some basic sounds for jumping and him getting hurt that have a sort of classic NES feel.  It took some fiddling around with BFXR, but I'm satisfied.  The sound effects will make good place-holders if the group decides to go for a more modern sound.  If they like the style, however, I may look at adding a chiptunes or electronic style to the Wagon Wheel song.  I have a friend from back home who would probably be willing to compose songs in that style if nothing else, though I may owe him dinner if that's the case.

I am probably going to whip up some horrible-looking tiles in MSPaint that I can use for basic collision detection--get N.B. standing, jumping, and such.  I'm not worried about how it'll look, since we'll be replacing assets with the art team's work as things go on.  I can always rip enemies straight from Ninja Gaiden to fill in for enemy collision detection.

That's right:  for a brief moment in our modeling phase, our beloved SMCM Seahawk will likely share a sprite with the most hated bird in gaming history.

That's all for now, beloved readers.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day.