Because they just are
Today I finished off the rail highlight work from yesterday - it now shows all the connected rails ahead of the train, and it's made the track so much easier to line-up. I also used the active rail info to stop the random tile flipper from destroying the player's layout; I'll probably revisit this soon,… Continue reading Day 14 – More game in the game
Today was mostly taken up by tidying & organising models. So far most of the 3D art has been done in two blend files, which is making it a bit awkward to collaborate as they're unmergable. I've been exporting obj files of the models manually (although I learned that FBX is a better choice, as… Continue reading Day 13 – Moving art around
Momentous occasion today - I had my first two bug reports from the build I sent out to Mr Blender and Mr Music last night. Apparently if the train crashes on the starting tile, then next game you don't get a train - its tile immediately flips on game start and destroys everything on it.… Continue reading Day 12 – Bug #001
Today I did my first Android build and ran it on my Nokia 8.1. All went smoothly - kudos to Unity for making the process of building for Android error-free and "just works". This showed a couple of issues: The camera's clipping the edges of the map; it was simple enough to fix this with… Continue reading Day 11 – Android & UI
Overnight Mr Blender has kicked out the two new tiles - the crossover and double-curve. The game instantly feels better with the extra variety, and looks a bit busier too. I spent a while playing with the grid size - it's been 6x6 so far, and now it's been bumped to 8x12 (for a portrait… Continue reading Day 10 – More rails, platforms (not that kind of platform)
First thing today I integrated the new rails from my out-source blenderiser, and quickly bashed in a piece randomiser that's slightly biased to choose curves over straights. First Game! This is the first time it's actually felt like a game! It's quickly raised a few points to address: Spinning tiles feels quite slow, especially if… Continue reading Day 9 – New rails!
Mood Board To solidify some of the thoughts I've had in my head and help to guide out-sourced art, I decided on some style pillars and found some references for them. Most of the art I chose for reference isn't public domain so I can't share it here, but the pillars I settled on should… Continue reading Day 8 – Mood, Tile Laying
Today I was intending to work on map randomisation, but instead decided to a bit of gameplay. As a nod to Snake, the player will be picking up coaches as they play that: make the train longer, and therefore a bit more of an obstacle itself if you try to curl back on yourselfboost the… Continue reading Day 7 – Coaches
Didn't get chance to post this last night, apologies for the delay! Today I finished coaxing the rotate & flip animations into fruition. I was blocked for a while by a Unity bug that was preventing me from adding an Animator parameter as a track on an animation. As is typical, after spending a long… Continue reading Day 6 – Reanimation
So, overnight I had a change of heart about the hexes - I do want squares after all. While they look nice and more interesting than squares, they're a bit awkward when it comes to gameplay. Hexes will produce a large turning circle - requiring three tiles to turn a train around 180 degrees, that… Continue reading Day 5 – Dehexing
TrainsAreAwesome 