DodgerV2 Part 3: Market research & Journal-ing.

Okay so this post might be a lot less informative and structured. I will be writing it as I go along during class. The plan for today (Thursday 21/11) is to Structure my storage for this project. All the documents I am writing in currently are just dropped into google drive. I am going to move them to a folder shared with my teacher. Get market research done. I am gonna spend some time looking through Google Play for 2D games and note some of their statistics like downloads, stars and release date. Set up Unity project and Github repository.

So let’s get started.

Sorting out drive.

This took less than 10 minutes to sort out and should hopefully help keep the project on track in the future. It was already spread between my website repository and Google Docs with my posts first being written down in docs and then rewritten before being published to the site.

Onto market research.

What I am looking for is free-to-play 2D games that seem to have similar to DodgerV2’s on the Google Play store top-lists.

Scrolling through the general game top-list didn’t give any interesting result. Most mobile games showing up for me right now seem to be 3D shooters, based on a popular IP, 3D shooters taking advantage of a popular IP or games “inspired” by popular 3D shooters, featuring stick figures fighting or cats.

The closest competitor to DodgerV2 is probably something like an endless runner where you rack up points for dodging things but even that isn’t a perfect match. I will have to come back to this later on.

Setting up Github repository and unity project.

Unity released a new update, we are now on 2019.2.13f1 instead of 12f1. Whilst that is downloading I will work on setting up the github repository.

I set it up with a simple readme file. You can find the repository here. Now it’s time to pull it and create the Unity project.

First steps in the Unity project. Change “Api Compatibility Level” to .NET 4.x .NET Standard 2.0 (changed in new Unity version) in Player settings. This is needed for ECS. Spend 10 minutes looking into IL2CPP vs Mono and then decide not to change that setting just yet. Activate the Entities preview package in the package manager

Okay so that was the basic setup of the Unity project. Next step will be setting up the Player character and I have a few thoughts about how to do that for hopefully maximum performance but that will have to be for the next lesson and post. I will also have to spend a bit more time planning out the next few steps of the project then. So..

Next time we will work on documenting the project and spec.

Written 05 Dec 2019 by Grim