Kana Kana Update

2 weeks left to get this game up and running.

I've managed to make a lot of progress today, but still have awhile to go before it is ready to play.

The game now has a proper title to work with. かなカナ(Kana Kana). Being that Kana is the name of the syllabaries in Japanese, and also a word meaning "I wonder" or "I think". A silly little pun that will need to be explained somewhere. Will be doing up the title screen when I get the chance.

Added a transparent sphere mesh to each letter to make them into balls. Also place a series of walls on the field with colliders on them to bounce the balls off.

Made it so that when a ball is clicked, an arrow will appear and rotate around the letter to follow the mouse. At the moment, the ball will move when clicked again but in a direction regardless of the mouse and with no loss of momentum.

Through use of some crafty coding I can now summon all 5 letter pairs to the field using only one mesh for all of them. I had to go back to using 5 separate materials for each letter (10 all up), but I should be able to go back to using texture swapping when I include the other letters (a half dozen other sets) by dividing them into sets.
Have also managed to set it up so that the letter pairs will recognise each other when they hit. They will then destroy and release a sparkly cloud of particles. In the end there will be some sort of score that is added to by this.

A lot done. Still more to come. This should be fun.

Status Update

After much thought I have decided to focus towards the pool concept from my last post. By removing the typing component I am hoping to make it simpler for the people who never seen these symbols before.

What I am planning is for a half dozen balls to appear on screen (a pair of each letter set [kana & alpha]), the player then clicks the ball they want to move. The objective is to bounce the ball around the table and into its partner. This is done until there are no letters remaining. A side challenge would be to do it in the fewest clicks possible.

At the moment I should have all the code-base I need to knock together a functional prototype, just need to type it in. Right now I can summon a pair of letters to random positions on the field easily, adding more shouldn't present a challenge. After that it's just clicking and firing that remain.

I have also fixed the issue of needing multiple materials to texture (still need the individual letters as textures though), now all I need to do is figure out how to change colour via code and it should be set.

Kana Brainstorming

Now that the project has a little momentum beneath it, it's time to start considering ways of making it a bit more playable.

_initiate_

Path 1: Bomb drop
Players click a section of the screen, placing a bomb. They then type a letter for that bomb to use. When the invading symbols enter the bomb's radius it explodes, taking out any symbols of the letter it was programmed with.
This would make it a kind of puzzle/strategy game, getting the player to work on clearing the screen with as few clicks as possible.

Path 2: Lasso pool
Not long ago I made a game involving using gravitational attraction to put an orb in a hole. This would be along a similar line of capturing a letter and luring it into the correct goal. Each goal would correspond to a letter set (a,i,u,e,o). Possible to even make it fit along the scope of billiards by having the player line up to sink the letter.
This would probably end up as a puzzle game, with the typing aspect removed in favour of matching the hiragana symbol with it's English opposite and then navigating the best way to get it in the hole.

_end_

I'll probably come up with a few more ideas in the next couple of days or so, luckily the requirements for most of the ideas I've come up with can be done using more or less the same code base. Therefore, I'll be able to build one then work others into a kind of arcade pack.

Kana Status

Today I've had the chance to work on my personal project a bit more.

The player can now type letters to make the symbols appear (a = あ, i = い, u = う, e = え, o = お). At the moment, though, the symbol appears by the dozen and firing out the wrong end of the cannon at high speed, but that should be easily fixable when I get a chance to sort it out a bit.

Next up is getting the enemy letters moving in (will need to sort out the firing error first though). Then I just need to work out the gameplay a bit, so people who haven't seen these letter before will still be able to play.

I have also made it so only 1 mesh is required for the letters with the material switching for each. Before I had a separate mesh and material for each letter, meaning the full version would require upwards of 80 meshes and textures accordingly. Now I just need the textures and a single mesh (I'll have to look into some sort of group texture system if I want to lower it more).

Working so far:

• cannon rotates to follow mouse
• keyboard entry
  
• material switching
• correct symbol appears when letter is pressed

Kebablhu menu sprites

For the past week or so I've been working on the menu sprites for Kebablhu. Simple little pixel assets to serve as menu buttons and cursors. Here are the finished products:

Personal Project: Game

In the hopes that I will have something to show for myself come end of semester (it's getting too close for comfort) I have decided to try and make one of my game ideas on my own.


My Unity skills are a bit rusty, so it's going to be slow going for a little while (until I get back into it a bit). The main things I need to work on is 2-3 digit character entry, randomisation of symbols, material switching, collision detection, and some form of controlling which character sets are in use (k, h, s, t, etc.).


This project should be simple enough not to interfere with my other work, yet still stand a chance of being workable by the end of semester. Time to get started.

Kabablhu asset concepts

Kabablhu is in need of some assets to populate the inventory. Therefore I've started work on some asset art.

First up, a lantern rough. Still needs to be coloured and tweaked.

Rough crowbar sketch.
I'll try for more later.