I’ve been working on an update to my Alien Checkers game and it’s turning out to be pretty cool, just to share I took a pic of my old version and underneath put a picture of what the new one is turning out to look like.
Check it out! I should have this version available in about a month. Anyway from this pic you can see one of the new features, is that you can choose a lot more colors than before!. Plus I’ve really been working hard to improve the game experience as well. I let the players move the camera around and I bring the camera down into the action when their are jumps. I’ll be posting updates here over the next few weeks as I get closer to completion. Oh and I used the new GUI system to create my buttons and such, pretty slick!
Looking sweet bro!
How does this game actually work? Is there like a Checker Board LOL?
or are like Planets and stuff work as the board?
Love the GUI though, looks great!
Thanks Warhead,
As far as game play goes, it’s actually fairly similar to the original, but I’ve done some things to make it a lot cleaner, and cooler too! First their is a checker board, a grid in space. To move the player drags their finger from the UFO to the square or squares that they wish to move to and when they lift their finger the move is is made. I used the Vectrosity asset from the asset store to draw animated, dashed, and curved lines that show the path the UFO will take. It looks very nice and I hope will be fun for the player too.
Thanks again for your comment, I’ll be posting some screen captures of game play tomorrow probably.
Wow, the progress you made graphically between those two images is really impressive. Nice work!
Thanks BeefSupreme!
I found new UFO’s on the3dStudio.com and switched to a different GUI skin that I found on the good’ol Unity Asset Store, that’s where I found some cool space back grounds too. So just for that small investment I was able to improve the look of the game quite a bit! I’ll be posting some more screen shots this weekend maybe even after work today.
I finally got around to taking those game play screen shots 
Looks really good! I love the nebula you have in the background
Thanks Beef,
The nebula is one of the sky boxes I found on the asset store.
So far I have 3 special power-ups, teleport, shields, and free-man. And I’ve been mulling over some other power up ideas too. But first I’m going to add some menus and GUI stuff to game scene. I might also add an option to change the background to one of the other sky boxes I downloaded, just to add a little more variety. So hopefully I’ll be able to find enough free time to get this done this week.
Let me know if you have any power up ideas
Hmmm… Is it pretty much straight up checkers? What power ups have you thought of so far?
So it’s checkers, but these power-ups spawn on the board, and if you land your UFO on one of them it activates. For example there is a shield power up and if you land on it, then that UFO gets shields and it’s protected from getting jumped. The power ups I have so far are
- Shields
- Teleport and
- Free-man
The ones I’ve thought about are
- Self Destruct - takes out your piece and all surrounding pieces
- Boarding Party - takes over one of your opponents UFO’s turning it into one of your UFO’s
- Scatter - causes all ufo’s to fly to different squares, basically shuffles the board (could be problematic coding wise)
- others???
The easiest type of power up to do is one that just spawns some sort of new gameObject that has a behavior that is completely independent of what the UFO’s are doing. So another one I thought about was calling some sort of death ray satellite that just flies over and blows up a few pieces. but I don’t know.
I also have to double check that if I destroy a piece in the middle of a turn or a move, I don’t crash the code, (causing a does not exist error or something, I think I’ve checked for that mostly but test test test right)
Well, you could do one that swaps two pieces. Or one that combines two pieces into a king…maybe it could be turn limited and if the king isn’t next to an open diagonal when the timer ends, you lose the top piece. How about a bomb type thing that pushes enemy pieces back? There could be a cloak that keeps a piece from being removed if it gets jumped.
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays with modifications in place, since checkers is pretty simple on its own.
Thanks for the ideas Beef! I like the bomb and swap ideas I have a demo at work that I am getting ready for so unfortunately my game hobby had to take a back seat this weekend. Hopefully I’ll have a few more screens and power ups to show at the end of this week.
Here’s a little i-movie trailer for my game
Nice work! Looks pretty good so far. I like the laser/explosion when you jump a piece. The cinema style credits at the end of the video cracked me up for some reason 
Yeah man, that’s all thanks to i-Movie’s movie trailer templates. It was fun making the vid, the music is so dramatic. By the way i have most of my in game menus done. I am still working on adding a few extra power ups, and I’m thinking I will be ready to publish by the end of November.
Check it out, over the weekend I added a new feature laser duel! I had this idea after I played this Godzilla game where you could lock beams with other monsters, and whoever tapped the right buttons fast enough wins. In my version the player will have to match the value of a slider that moves around on you. This is a clip of the computer playing against itself:
So I’ve submitted this rebooted Alien Checkers for approval, so if it gets approved I guess it’s no longer a work in progress, it will be a work in maintenance here’s another screen shot, one thing I didn’t post about was giving the player choice of star field backgrounds, this is a nice red back ground, and of course a cool explosion. Hopefully my next post will be to say, go download and play it
Ok just got word from Apple that Alien Checkers is available for download, I also put it on google play and Amazon, it’s 100% free, no ads, and no in-app purchases so just down load and enjoy, but if you wouldn’t mind giving me some nice comments on what ever store you choose to down load from, that’d be cool by me
Available now:
iOS
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alien-checkers/id871401994?ls=1&mt=8
Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evm.aliencheckers
Amazon
http://amzn.com/B00HFY5EZU