It's not you it's me... ok it's you

Alright OUYA, I think we should take a break, see other platforms, and get some perspective.  After weeks of trying to get the controller working for our game on the OUYA system, I've about given up.  Especially considering there is no way we're going to finish a whole game in time for the OUYA launch.

OUYA has a really cool offer going on where if you release a game for their system at launch, you get a year of free advertising, not to mention being one of very few games available.  The exposure would have been amazing.  But that goal was utterly unrealistic.  Trying to create a game from scratch with no experience making games in six months... umm, no.  

So we're shifting focus and aiming for mabile maybe later this year, maybe next.  But, that means we can focus on a set of platforms, i.e. Android and iOS for release.  Porting it to Xbox or Steam later should be pretty easy, but for now we're going to focus on mobile.

Lets release it for all platforms... yes for the Atari too.

One of the coolest things about Unity is how easy it is to switch platforms.  From PC, to Xbox, to PS3, to Android, to iOS, to web player etc.

Since we're developing this for the OUYA, an android based console, I thought why not get it on my phone too.  That means virtual controls though, so I did some research and some learning.  Turns out its not to hard to implement virtual controllers and on screen buttons.

Bigger... BIGGER!

We've been struggling with scale to some degree.  In our UDK prototype we had trouble getting all the buildings and the cars and the poeple to appear they are sclaed correctly to each other. Now, we're having trouble making the bird look like a bird and not an airplane.

We tried scaling the buildings up by 50% and that seems to be better, but I'm still not getting the feeling of being a small bird in a large city.

Additionally, I want the bird to lean as its turning to replicate flight.  After a week of trying to get it to work via animation, I started over and just did it via code.  Works much better now.  Hopefully our programmer will be able to clean up my scripting and/or code its movement more realistically.  For now I'm more or less getting the desired effect though.

Its all a big poop joke

So now that we have some kind of idea what we're going to be designing our game around, (WWII and poop) we've decided that everything should be a combination of a poop joke and something to do with WWII.  For example, General MacSharter, or the Deuce Goose, or Schitzkrieg.

We're also trying to think of poopy achievements like, "pooped in the punch bowl" or "befouled the fountain."

It smells like cheese in here

This week I've been focusing on controls.  Well that and a grid pattern that makes my world look like its made out of cheese.  With a little help from the internet I discovered the input manager in Unity.  Its great, or it would be if I actually knew what I was doing with it to create custom input devices.  However, some nice chap has done it for us, and I was able to simply replace the input manager file in my project and presto chango, the Xbox360 controller now works.  I was able to change the input from keyboard to the joystic buttons in my movement code so now the birds flight responds to a controller.  I think this should traslate directly into the OUYA since its Android based.  That should make coding for the controller really easy.

And God said, "Let there be a block world"

Thanks to Jaymie Vaz, we have the basic idea for building type and layout.

Thanks to me, it now exists as a block world in Unity.

There's no BomBIRDier without the BIRD

B-b-b-bird bird bird.. 

So here is the bird imported to Unity from our original UDK.  Flight is working and we have an auto leveling script running so the bird doesn't try and fly around sideways or upside down.