So, as I have become more and more accustomed to Unity, I have begun to realize that there is not future for my projects in my old trusty Clickteam Fusion engine. So it’s about time that I started portin things to Unity. This is also true for Solid Climber, and so far I’m pretty happy with the result. Fun story, I built a editor rotation script to help me rotate things for my Stricod project. In that case I’m using it to create rooms of a circular space station. For Solid Climber I’m reusing that script but for creating a round tower as well as clouds and grass around it.

Sort of works so far, but it will be a little while before it gets to the same readiness as my original project.

So I finally spent some time digging into the code of Solid and managed to make some real real progress on the questing system. There is apparently still some issue with updating progress of the right quests… or maybe it’s just that some quest progress listeners hand me data when nothing should be happening. I only saw the bug on my phone. Anyway, it has been a long day and I have gone from being naively positive, to very angry, to presently at peace. There were some horrid bugs which I just couldn’t understand when I started out, then it got a little better and then a lot worse. For a while I was seriously worried about the project’s future. This was countered with some fresh new starts and ideas leading to a feel-good session of untested coding. Then things went really bad again and I was angry for a while, sorting out bugs and cursing in chorus. Eventually the buggyness lifted and I was left with something that didn’t crash and behaved. I was even able to build a testable apk. Before I let people test it I want to figure out that progress bug though, and add some little bits of new eye candy so that you can feel that it’s a new version. : )

I have returned to Solid Climber after having worked on my web tool Ztinker for awhile. Getting back to my old code I become what any good hacker should be, confused. Very confused. I didn’t take too long to get back on track and realize how weirdly I’ve been solving things though. I left the project while adding the final major feature, quests. In my latest update I managed to get quest progress to update according to which quest it was and other related values, such as difficulty and reward according to level, to work. The next step is to add a lot of various quests and design the listeners for these quests to record progression. The player should also be able to unlock new quests by buying them from the store, which requires some updates to how the store works… Going to be cool nevertheless. : )

It’s been quite some time since I wrote anything here. The latest update is that I began working on a quest system which will give the player a few small tasks to complete for each run with in-game money rewards.

So it’s done. The zoom effect I was inspired to work with during No More Sweden is not in Solid Climber. I still have to fix it so that I can choose where to center the camera in y-axis (because the tower is always in center in x-axis) but it works.

Next up is, except for fixing the y-axis thing, the achievement and progression systems.

The project is now called Solid Climber, because it makes sense.

I haven’t posted anything for a while now. This is because I have been working very slowly with a major graphical update, namely doubling the resolution. I didn’t feel that there was a point in posting before I got it working, and I have also started some new projects which stole some time.

The resolution has been changed from 180*320 to 360*640 which is the portrait counterpart to my Gr3at M4gician resolution. I choose the original one because I wanted to keep the game a small project, but I later realized that I prefer to work with this size of graphics for my current style and it also looks much better.

There was an update to Fusion which fucked up the chipped solution for storing external data. Before it was awkward because it didn’t work the same on different platforms but now I just couldn’t get it to work on Android at all. There also seems to be some bug to setting Android app permissions because the project doesn’t save the value of a checkbox for allowing reading of external data. Luckily the Clickteam somehow knew that their “ini-file”-update wasn’t that great and also sent an Android backwards compatibility object with it. It’s really silly, but now everything is working so it’s not the worst engine update issue anyone ever had.

I partook in a gamejam called No More Sweden the weekend before last weekend and during that jam I met Arvi Teikari aka Hempuli who have been making a lot of great games I liked in the past. As we discussed projects I saw that he had been playing around with zoom or simulation of a 3d camera, something that is not natively supported by Fusion. I have understood that it was possible, because scaling is possible, but during my last try I just dismissed it as probably too CPU heavy and complicated. However this game me new hope and two scripting lines later and it was working. I made a small game with the working title Zoom Test from that, started working on a platform game which will be picking up my old time project Tharyn’s Tale and I’m planning to try and add zooming to Solid Jumper as well.

So my previous vision for the GUI between the game sessions of Solid Climber have been very much focusing on a standard flat view with several surfaces that you can swipe or use buttons to navigate in between. These interfaces should be used for restarting the game, browsing the in-game store and browsing the in-game progression. A friend of mine who tested the game said that it would be cool if the GUI would behave similarly to the rest of the objects in the game world and rotate around the tower.

I haven’t been posting many updates recently and this is due to two major graphical changes in the game. The rotating interface and increasing the resolution of the game. I have not reached a satisfactory result regarding the rotating interface. : )

I have added the first of a few magical runes that will spawn now and then. If the player touches them their powers are transferred to the player, changing the control scheme to something gimmicky towards that rune and giving a means to beat the dragon.

I made ice, which will cause to player to freeze the air in front of her and skate around on the ice. Coming up are fire and thunder for the first release.

During this development I ran into some weird problems when I wanted to use my command for rotating the tower to a certain point. I finally remembered that I had implemented the rotation in a very hacky way, so I fixed that and now it makes more sense and needs less code.

I also started working on the system for equipping and unequipping items. I ran into some problems with setting them into a certain state of either,  not bought, unequipped and equipped. Will fix that later.

I have added a state from which the game starts and to where it returns on restart. The game start is represented with the character standing on the ground by the tower. To begin the player presses the screen which causes the character to jump onto the wall and start the ascent.

When the character is hit it falls down. When the player pushes “retry” objects are moved to give the impression of a descent along the tower, back to the ground where the character waits unharmed.