First mini-game trial "completed"
I've finished the little Peg Solitaire game to the point where the original board I grew up with is completely playable right up until the end game. I do plan on extending it somewhat though, things I would like to add, when I have time, include:
Multiple starting and end-goal layouts
Highscore tables for each of the above
I learned a lot about the Unity engine in this process, as well as a lot about publishing games from an Indie developer perspective. My history with game publishing has been either through more official channels (while wearing my LGP hat) or through open source/free distribution where you really don't care you just put up files for people to download.
I thought, since this tiny game is playable, I'd try publish it at the lowest possible price various platforms allow for an Indie developer like Steam, Desura, Gameolith, The Ubuntu Store etc. I've received feedback from some (this game is "too small" -- not unexpected it was after-all meant to be a throw-away project en-route to a larger overall goal) and some I'm still awaiting feedback from. My thoughts behind attempting to publish something as silly and tiny as this game were simple, I wanted to learn not only about creating games with Unity, but how publishers react and deal with submissions from an "Indie".
One note that's worth mentioning here is that during this whole publishing process I thought this little game would be ideal for mobiles. With this in mind I did a large amount of research into Google Play store and all that's required. As it turns out, in the end, I cannot (pretty much ever) go this route with any of my games. Google Checkout (required for Google Play products) doesn't allow merchant accounts from South Africa, the country in which I live. This leaves me stumped. There's sadly nothing I can do until they decide to open up to my country. In the mean time they'll gladly take my money, but won't let me receive any.
This is truly sad. There are many fantastic developers down here in Africa and having obstacles like this is just one in a long chain of many unfortunate things holding this continent back from being able to truly compete on a global scale.
Political rants aside though, I've decided on at least one more smaller project I'm going to work on as part of this process.
This time round I want to learn more about Unity's multi-player and networking support and I'll be working on a modern retake of an old DOS game which has since been made freeware and ported to many platforms. I'll be doing it in "side view 3D" so it'll retain it's old platform nature but with modern graphics and over-network game play allowing the hordes to unleash themselves against friends and strangers alike in multiplayer rabbit mayem ;)
Here's a screenshot of the original game:
I don't think creation of something this simple will take that long either, possibly a week or two to get the minimal playable version up and running. The following is a list of what I hope to learn, in the Unity engine, from this next small game "Bunny Bash" :
Multi-player & Networking support
In-game level creation and distribution
Dynamic Level rendering (of created levels, en-route to full blown random level generation for the roguelike).
Anyway, that's where I am for now. More screenshots of Bunny Bash will follow as well as updates on the publishing process from Peg Solitaire.
As a final note: I've been working on dungeon generation algorithms as well as my plans for in-game AI and I think when I finally start putting Roguelike Worlds prototypes up you'll all be very pleasantly surprised by the in-game experience.
