Project “KeepBall” One Month In

Hi! It’s DynaZor here!
Project ‘KeepBall’ just passed a month of development!

 Disclaimer:
Everything in this blog post is written from my own point of view
which is based solely on my own experiences and knowledge.
I might be wrong and I know it.
Also, not everything written on the internet is factual  

It’s been a month now!

Wow, so here I stand, worked a full month on this solo project!
It’s been tough, but I held up and got results.
Since it’s taking up a toll on me, and it has become less effective,
I’m moving from weekly post to a monthly post.
This way I’ll have much more to talk about in each post,
more time to make it and less stress in the project.
Goal will also be set monthly, which I’ll need to learn to estimate.

This month was very diverse in feelings and toughness.
I’ll sum up this month:

• Week 1;
  Goals: Make a Proof Of Concept and play test
  It was the week with the most bugs and thus I learned the most.
  Also, it was the most exciting time in the project, as everything is new.
• Week 2;
  Goals: Improve the base mechanic, fix the code and add levels
  This week was the start of the fall in adrenaline,
  a very technical week, with lots of testing.
  But a very interesting blog post to write!
• Week 3;
  Goals: Make and implement new systems
  New systems may sound exciting, but I wasn’t really moved by them.
  But they were very important to make the workflow better and
  to satisfy the testers.
• Week 4; (This week)
  Goals: Making new levels and improving the visual aspect of the game
  The most creative week and therefore the 2nd most exhausting one.

Goals, goals everywhere

As every week, I set goals for this one.
Here’s how I held up:

• 1 new mechanic, 7 new levels (out of 1 and 4 respectively)
  now the game has a total of 25 levels!
• 6 new achievements;
  now there’s a total of 9 achievements
• Graphics for the achievements; 8/9 made
• Responsive UI – now the game supports all landscape aspect ratios

Also, I made Graphics settings,
added Sound system with options, basic BGM and sounds
and general UI improvements that affect the gameplay.

Now, this is the first time in this project that I set goals for a month,
I’ll try and estimate the best I can.

• Ball variants system and 5 ball variants
• 4 new achievements
• 4 new levels
• Interactive tutorial system
• Gamepad control system (currently only mouse)

Tips and tricks

As always, these are targeted at Unity 2019.1.0f2

• Object doesn’t react to script’s movement
  If you want to control object’s transform from script
  and it doesn’t react to it;
  Make sure the object doesn’t have
  an Animator component enabled.
  The animator overrides all other transform calls.
• Reducing build size
  Reduce build size by enabling compression on textures and sprites.
  Setting compression quality to Low doesn’t always hurt the quality
  of the asset but can significantly reduce file sizes.
  Also use Crunch Compression where it doesn’t hurt quality.
• LWRP settings in-game
  If you want to have Graphics Settings in the game while using LWRP,
  (might be applicable to HDRP, I didn’t try)
  make a couple of Pipleline Assets, each as a certain quality level.
  Then in the game you can assign a current Pipeline Asset with:

using UnityEngine.Rendering;
using UnityEngine.Rendering.LWRP;

// Assign a public var to hold the asset, assign from the inspector
public LightweightRenderPipelineAsset ultraQuality;

// Change the current Pipeline Asset to Ultra
public void ChangeToUltraQuality()
{
	GraphicsSettings.renderPipelineAsset = ultraQuality;

	// You can also configure the Pipline Asset from code
	ultraQuality.renderScale = 0.5f;
}

So this is it for this week.

Have a nice day,
Shahar DynaZor Alon.