Happy New Year!

I think you can very easily guess what my goal is for this new year :). This is it. I will finish a game (at least) and put it out there in the world, whatever the outcome may be.  This last month has been frustrating: Jose Luis had no internet access for weeks and some problems that prevented us from coordinating and making enough progress.  But it is looking better now.  Meanwhile, I have learned a thing or two about writing games for the iThings with Unity.  For example, explosions and such, which are created with what is called "particle systems" are problematic on apple devices.  Following some advice and some example scripts I found, I was able to create a tool to play these particle systems on my machine and record them in an animated image that can be used on an iThing without slowing it down too much.  Also, after playing quite a few space shooter games on my iPhone, I think I've found my favorite way to control the space ship on a horizontal shooter.  Basically you just place your finger on the screen and move it around and the spaceship mimics your movement.  You can try these two little improvements on the very minimalistic game page on http://engelsanchez.net/shooter.  We have also successfully created test builds for iPhone, which my friend Kieran and Jose Luis have installed and tried. If anybody else out there has an iPhone or iPad and feels like helping a brother out, please send me your device ID! If you don't know how to get it, here are some instructions.

The next steps will be to create a few background props and a couple of simple enemies to make the prototype feel more like a proper game.  Also, this will help us build our pipeline. That is, figure out the programs and techniques we need to use to create game objects and add them to the game in the easiest way possible.  Besides the technical aspects of the whole operation, the most important thing still is and will always be communication.  We need to learn to work together, pass ideas back and forth and make sure each we are understanding each other.  Luckily, Jose Luis and I have plenty of motivation to keep us going. 2012, here we come!