Shamelessly plugging our new game coming out soon!
OMG looks awesome !
insta-buy as soon as it hits the store 
Plug away!
I just saw it on toucharcade and promptly came over here to post, I guess yah beat me. Keep up the work man!
- Matt
Can you tell us about the making of the game. Do you use the sprite manager class, orthographic camera, character controller ?
I want to know your technique. Thanks 
We didn’t use sprite manager, we used mostly skinned meshes and cutout alpha shaders (with the occasional alpha blended element like the HUD or drop shadows beneath characters. Animation is achieved by sliding/rotating body parts around like paper dolls in our 3d app, like Zombieville. This affords us with a high degree of fluidity without the need for enormous memory-hogging sprite sheets. However, when we need a character to strike a pose that cannot be achieved simply by rotating parts of a single drawing, we re-drew the character, cut them up again, and swap to that texture at runtime. The player uses over a dozen such distinct drawings (poses) which we can swap to as needed, and then apply further animation from there. The end result is a smooth and lively style which we’re pretty proud of.
Orthographic cameras were not used, but rather a perspective camera positioned very very far away with a narrow FOV. This gives a nearly orthographic look, but with a subtle parallax effect on foreground/background elements that we get “for free” simply by positioning things on different depths within unity. Its pretty much a more elaborate version of how we achieved the style in Zombieville.
OMG Awesome! Looks fantastic! Can’t wait to buy it.
So you create a 3D mesh of the characters with a cutout shader and rendered out the poses then used them like a 2d sprite. Thats pretty cool!
Now that is how you do it, sweet animations.
Looks really great. Nice weight and balance in the fighting anims. That’s always really hard to get right.
Looks like another winner!
Looks fantastic! Congrats on another sure-fire hit. If this doesn’t take off on the App Store then complaints about luck-driven success are surely validated
How do I cut off 3d meshes off a 3d model? And what do you mean you did the cut off and meshes in the unity 3d app?
I don’t even know what I’m asking is the correct game development terminology
:? Just messing around in unity as a hobby and curiosity
:lol:
What sort of production stats are behind the game as it appears in the video (months of development, hours/week, number of developers and roles, etc)?
Mika Mobile is Kelli Noda and Noah Bordner - we’re both animators primarily, but I (Noah) handled the code, design and effects work on this project, as well as a fair amount of the artwork. It took about 6 months at a fairly relaxed pace, or roughly five times longer than Zombieville. We don’t expect it to do five times as well though 
Since a picture is worth 1000 words, here’s a screen grab that should better illustrate how our environments and characters are constructed…
man I’m jealous of people who can be designer and coder at the same time, a rare mix me thinks
I can code, but will never be able to do art like this, which looks awesome btw!!!
And thanks for sharing pictures, it really is so much easier to visualise things especially for code heads like me
Wow! :shock: Looks very awesome! I am jealous of your team’s artistic talent! Very good job. I hope this does as well as it should in the App store!
Ok, you have an animated character with meshes and when you change pose, you say than you change texture. Do you change texture on the same meshes or do you swap with an other prefab (construct with new meshes) for other poses ?
thx for answers
Brilliant work! You’ve been tweeted.
Looking forward to play it.
First congratulations on what looks to be another well done game. I look forward to picking it up.
Second I would like to thank you for being so forthcoming about your development work flows.
very much appreciated
Here I did a tech interview with Kelli and Noah on Zombieville… goes into the process
Really looking forward to this one as well Noah.
~t
We change textures on the same mesh, although you could do an entire model swap if you wanted (we do this only for when enemies are killed). When we built the main character, I laid out the texture’s UV in such a way that each body part had a fair amount of empty space to work with - so the “leg” polygon was big enough to accomodate a bent leg, an extended leg, etc.
We then set up a link in our 3D app between the X-scale of an empty node, and the current texture being displayed (you can do this with set-driven-keys in maya). So if the X-scale of this node was 1, we’d see texture 1, 2 would display texture 2, etc. This allowed us to animate our texture swaps within maya, rather than having to hard-code each transition, or use hundreds of animation events.
Once the relationship was set up in maya, it was simply a matter of setting up a similar relationship within unity (if transform.scale.x == 1…), placed in a LateUpdate function so it would be applied after any animation, but before the frame is rendered.
For deaths we chose to do a full model swap because the character is suddenly made up of more pieces than they started with, so it was just easier to make that a different model instead of trying to stuff all of those individual pieces into the same textures they use when they’re alive.