After returning from college, Justin has gotten back to Southern California and now the Hammerwing Team is making much better progress in Techno Dash! New concept art was created, the tutorial has been designed and prototyped and gaps in the art are now being filled.
Concept and Redesign
After returning and having a nice get together, it was time to work on the game! The first part is creating more concept art and screenshot mockups of redesign ideas on some of the menus and replacements of the stand-in game items.
The awesome thing was that we were able to put the Hammerwing UI into action by easily moving, modifying different elements to emulate the ideas that we had. This totally beat having to spend time creating more mockups.
Tutorial
During and after the concept and redesign, Justin got into designing and programming the tutorial of Techno Dash. He was able to create a modified version of the procedural generation and create a controller script which allows the game to not only create special obstacles, but also analyze the player's performance and repeat certain sections if need be. The awesome thing is that after creating that, Justin implemented a similar system to the normal procedural generation, giving it more interesting capabilities and expanding gameplay!
Currently the framework is in place and the scene in Unity is built, the only thing to do now is to create a special HUD, which brings us to the next topic.
Tweaking Hammerwing UI and More Tools
Both the redesign and the tutorial revealed that we needed to add some new abilities to the Hammerwing UI system. Luckily everything is in place so that if we want to create a new behavior, it is simply creating a new script to go into the folder.
Another thing Nate noticed is that if we were to be replacing the stand-in textures of the meshes, it would be a tedious process of doing it one by one. This prompted him to create another tool which allows him to use a texture sheet and a XML file to generate a large number of meshes at the lick of the button! It took him a few evenings however the amount of time it will save in the long run is well worth the effort!
More Metrics
Justin put together the rest of the metrics system to make sure the things are properly recorded now! We initially thought of doing an in-house analytics however it quickly appeared that it would require us to learn and manage SQL Databases and such, which would ultimately take time away from gamedev work. We've looked at a few options and some seem appealing.
Business Stuff Too!
Both Nate and Justin went down and got an account opened. After that we've signed up for hosting on NearlyFreeSpeech.net which will be holding the redesigned website when time comes around. Right now we are working on transferring the Apple Dev license to the company now which we will then be able to start testing the IAP.
