DodgerV2 Part 6: Mobile Controls, Polish & Google Play
We are getting close to the end, probably. I can’t actually tell with these projects. But the plan for today is to implement mobile controls and to do that I will need to do some refactoring.
Currently we handle rotation by taking the rotation keys input and rotating the character by that amount. That doesn’t quite work if we have a joystick controlling it. In that case we want to turn to the direction the joystick is positioned. If you put the joystick up the ship should face up, if you put it to the left your ship should face left. To do this I have decoupled the RotationInput from the Z rotation we should have so joystick input can just change the TargetZrotation directly. We already do something similar with movement so no need to change that. Now to actually implement the joystick I grabbed the Joystick Pack from the unity asset store and checked out their examples. It isn’t too complex and I should be able to make it work with DodgerV2.
After not much fiddling I got the joysticks to work fine and also added a fire button and it works fine! Now to test it on my device and update my website to allow me to display my games in a nice manner. Which by the time you read this has already happened and that checks off another one off my things on the to do list.
A time later…
So you know what happened since last time I worked on this post? The world kinda shut down. Corona became a lot bigger and now all Swedish Gymnasiums are doing online-classes instead. This does mean I can use my home computer for development and gain a lot of screens and power. I have been making adjustments to UI and testing android builds for a few days now.
I am at a bit of a fork in the road. Currently you can pretty much ignore rotating your ship and still play really well. I am making a test build where you can’t rotate and see if that is more fun. I also redid movement so it is a lot more responsive but slightly less spacey and will force my friends and family to play both versions. After a bit of testing no rotation seems to be the better liked version.
Regarding Google Play. I bought a developer license thing so now I can post DodgerV2 on there once I make a good build. I have about a week until the presentation still and I would really like to be able to go “And it’s on google play right now.” at the end of it.
One more day (20th of March)
I am not working on leaderboards for highscores. And I also added a share button for sharing your highscore on social medias and stuff. To do this I used a plugin called NativeShare which really did all the work for me and for the leaderboards I followed this guide by google to quickly implement them.
Another (21st & 22nd of March)
I am moving fast trying to tweak and test things as much as possible. I changed up the highscore share to show a screenshot like the one below. This is a lot more interesting to share than just the text it was before.
A few more guildies have tested the game and I got the comment “addicting and fun” back so this seems to be going better than expected. I also put in controller support which is pretty much the best way to play the game now, it is incredible.
There isn’t much left for me to do. I need to polish the Google Play store page and then get this show on the road. I would like to release it within the next week preferably before the presentation now so I can get some numbers to show off.
And this is where I sign off. Perhaps there will be a last post as a postmortem but for now: Thank you for reading and goodbye.
Written 24 Mar 2020 by Grim
