Settings Menu Revisited

It’s been a bit of a busy month doing things mostly unrelated to my game. However, I did manage to implement the ability to purchase Characters and Levels using the in-game currency (Milk).

optionsmenu

Milk can currently be earned by watching adverts (selected from the main menu) or by simply playing the game. Each point in game is 1 milk. I’m still trying to figure out prices for the various items but I really want to keep it quick and easy to progress, while still trying to encourage the player to watch an ad or two. I’m now working on allowing the user to buy milk with real money if they choose and will leave an update once that’s done.

Cheers, J

Settings Menu

I’ve finally finished the desert level. Well, kind of. It’s good enough to let me add it to the settings menu so that I can get its main functions essentially completed. I’ll still have to create an option to unlock the various characters and map types (plus add more choices to both) but that can happen at a later date <cough>Any reason to avoid making more models</cough>.

settingsmenu

I’m now looking into integrating IAP (In App Purchases) into the game. Unfortunately I may have to ditch that idea as opening up a merchant account (often quite expensive) is WAY farther than I wish to go. It’s possibly something to look at in the future but for such a simple game as this one (and one that I doubt will generate much revenue) it’s simply too much to bother with. Perhaps just keep the game Play/Watch Ads to unlock items and see how well that goes.

Creating Models

This has been my month… Model making. More model making. Getting fed up and doing a bit more work on the main menu – mostly the high score system as I want folks to be able to compare their position to all other players. This required setting up a database (I added one to this site) and getting back into PHP and MySQL to write the server side scripts to allow the game to post and receive scores/rankings.

On a good note I am slowly getting a bit more proficient at making the models. Thankfully I’m not going for a photo-realistic aesthetic so my low poly efforts are fine.

Low Poly Helicopter
Low Poly Helicopter

I still have loads more models to go. Fun 😐

Unity Ads

Wow. That was easier than I expected. I signed up in the services section of Unity, turned on “test mode”. Then created a button and added the following 2 scripts to said button and it worked like a charm 🙂

This code shows the rewarded ad types. Video ads that the player chooses to watch and will be rewarded if they are seen to the end.

using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.Advertisements;

public class UnityAdsInitializer : MonoBehaviour {
    [SerializeField]
    private string
        androidGameId = "Number Found In Services->Settings->Advanced",
        iosGameId = "Number Found In Services->Settings->Advanced";

    [SerializeField]
    private bool testMode;

    void Start() {
        string gameId = null;

#if UNITY_ANDROID
        gameId = androidGameId;
#elif UNITY_IOS
        gameId = iosGameId;
#endif

        if (Advertisement.isSupported && !Advertisement.isInitialized) {
            Advertisement.Initialize(gameId, testMode);
        }
    }
}

Continue reading →

Pause Screen

I’ve been working on the in game pause screen for a bit now. I really wanted to let the user see the island as a whole plus have the ability generate new islands (start a new game) while in the game mode. It’s actually turned out pretty nice 🙂

Pause screen

The “only” things left are to implement are:

  1. A game over screen
    • Convert points into spendable credits
    • Log a high score online
  2. Front end menus
    • Character/Island select
    • Possible shop
    • Facebook integration?
    • etc
  3. Models for characters and island types (plus super secret bonus level)
    • Loads of modelling in Blender coming up… great :-/

There will probably be loads of other things I haven’t even thought of yet.