This is the fifth post in a series of blogs catered to discussing the progress of a game being developed by 4 individuals for mobile using Unity. In this project, the role of coding the base mechanics of the game has been given to Pratik.
In this blog I will outline many of the major changes that are in the process of being made since our second playtest feedback as well as more changed from the first playtest.
One of the main things we were asked of was of a more varied level design. For our second playtest I was able to get a sort of breakable tile functioning by making it one of the level goals to destroy them. Simply match a tile within it and it'll take damage and eventually break. The first level to include them only has one hit point so breaks instantly on the first match. The next levels require two hits before they break thus increasing the difficulty.
There was also the inclusion of a level with blank tiles present. However, from the playtest we found that many people had an issue of the game freezing on this level and giving illegal matches which prevented the player from progressing. This was extremely frustrating as from the several playthroughs I did of this level while making it, I did not come across a single error which is why I included it. This is why we do playtests otherwise we wouldn't have known about this bug. Although I have tried to fix this a countless number of times, I am stuck for the first time in this project. I will continue to try and fix it on the side but there are other aspects that are more important to polish and get right before spending more time on this issue. If the team and I can't figure it out, it'll most likely be scrapped.
Now onto the more interesting things, as you can see there are new graphics! Although I'm not the creator of them, I placed most of them into the world of the game and a little bit of code behind some of them which was mentioned last blog.
The background image on both were placed by me as well as all of the graphics of the level selections and play/exit buttons. You'd think these are relatively simple tasks, but getting everything to line up on mobile and multiple different aspect ratios and screen sizes is horrible and takes a lot longer than I'd hoped for. Although the final result looks great! The level select was created by using a grid feature in Unity to space each icon out evenly while keeping all their functionality of being buttons. The falling of the ores (not made by me) on the main menu is the icing on top to really make it stand out.
The dynamite text graphic which was there before but must be mentioned again as it is part of the overhaul and polish.
I placed and aligned all the new buttons and graphics except the confetti and lava drops. Once again, lining everything up for mobile was a challenge but I got it done. The particle effect active on the bomb was not created by me however I did help develop the code for turning the effect on and off depending on if a charge was available or not. The functionality of both the pickaxe and bomb are being created by me. They will be ready for the next blog! All of these graphic enhancements really set the mood and tone of what the game is about as well as giving a character to the players.
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