The last few months have been quite productive. Summer is over and now we are into fall and development of Techno Dash is still going on.
Now in Unity4
That's right, we have finally migrated our project from Unity 3.5 onto Unity 4 engine. It took a good number of tweaks here and there over a few days before we got it working perfectly. The benefit of moving to 4 was that the engine will keep up with any of the changes to iOS for the foreseeable future, making it easier to provide updates. We also didn't want to end up in a scenario where we had to spend time post-release migrating where the time would better be spent developing a future project.
Metrics System Online
Another "tipping point" reason was that Game Analytics made their metric service free and their plugin was based on Unity4. We jumped at that and created an account with them. The best part is that all we needed to do was write the code to simply report the measured metric to GA (one line per 'event'), so it actually fitted almost perfectly to what we built. We played on our test devices and found it working straight away!
Time to start "Trimming"
During development we found a couple things that continue to be troublesome, such as getting the Twitter plugin to work. As much as we'd like to have the features in, both of us decided we should cut them from our initial release to save us time and effort. The benefit to the cutting is that it has given us focus on the more important parts of the game. We know there are some "paid" plugins that do the work so we plan to have the income from the game pay for the plugin and implement it in a future update.
College Again...
Since the last post Justin has taken two summer classes online and now is back at UCSC for his last two terms of college. This had once again limited his time working on the game however he's taking the chance to learn more from the game design classes he "visits."
Getting So Close!
Right now we are pretty much in the realm of the last 10% of the game's development. It's going to be a tough push making sure all the details are filled out. The one aspect that needs the most work now is replacing the stand-in sound effects with ones that work well with the game. Some more art assets need to be made and some menus need to be cleaned up and polished.
