Townsend - For Android iPhone (WIP Title)

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1

Hello all,

I have been developing Townsend with Unity on and off for over a year now. A few months ago I decided to take some time off work to go full-force on the project, and I haven’t looked back since.

Townsend is a collection/farming 3D game with rpg elements, interactive gestures, and cartoon-but-lifelike graphics. I’m aiming for something of a mix of Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon for touchscreens with some other ideas sprinkled in.

As a player you can control your avatar with interactive touch gestures as you vicariously fish, mine, catch, collect, and explore the Townsend world. Each stage in all processes will have its own set of interactions: imagine watering crops more efficiently by twirling your finger in a circle on the screen like you’re spreading the water around, or timing your taps on the screen to the animation of your character mining with a pickaxe to go faster. My background in Human-Computer Interaction is really driving this aspect, so I should be able to pull off a system that is novel and engaging–and not annoying :slight_smile:

Townsend will be released for Android, iPhone, and hopefully OUYA! (I’m a dev backer)

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I spent a big chunk of time building my development blog from the ground up, as I really want to show you all my development progress. You’ll find every update there, each accompanied by an in-depth description, a web-player build, an android apk, and many pictures. Of course I’ll also give updates in short form here as well. If you like what I’m doing, I’d love you to fill up my blog’s comments section and drop me a line!

www.townsendme.com

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So, I finally feel that I’m to the point where I have something very close to a working, playable title–and now I come to you. I would be happy to get some feedback, but most of all I hope you enjoy watching the development of Townsend–and playing it too! :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Unislash

Update: Here’s the newest demo and apk! I’ll be updating this regularly :slight_smile:

2

My first update is more of a what’s-happened-so-far post. A ton of development went into Townsend before I posted it here on the forums, and I figure I should mention it.

  • T4M Integration
  • A* Pathfinding Integration
  • Development of the object placement grid system (from the ground up)
  • Camera Touchscreen Controls
  • Planting Growing system
  • Player Animations (placeholders)
  • A bunch of assets
    –>Grass/Landscape textures
    –>Trees (originals from Fatbox Software, textures heavily modified)
  • Skybox, lighting, lightmapping
  • Minimal Inventory
  • Concept art (drawn by my talented cousin with terrible first drafts by myself)
  • Music (composed by Cole Seeley)

For in-depth descriptions of all of these developments, see my development blog at www.townsendme.com :slight_smile:

And here’s a link to the newest webplayer

I hope you’re interested in Townsend’s development! If you want to know more information about any system I’ve made or integrated, don’t hesitate to ask.

Cheers,
Unislash

3

This sounds really awesome! No PC release?

4

Hey, thanks :-). I am trying to really focus on touchscreen devices for my original release, but PCs are definitely in the cards for secondary release, in my mind right after OUYA compatibility.

One thing that I didn’t really expand upon in the opening post is how closely I will tie touchscreen gestures/interactions with ingame processes. For instance, for farming there will be a few stages in the process: prepare/plant land, water, and harvest. Each stage will have an intuitive gesture for the player to perform in order to increase the efficiency of the stage. Take the watering stage: the gesture will be simply moving your finger in a circle as fast as you can in an effort to ‘spread’ the water around. If the player performs well, they will not only water the plant next to the avatar but also the plants next to it too. If not, just the one plant gets watered. That way people who can’t/don’t want to do the interaction don’t have to.

I don’t know of many games that have done this level of interactiveness for touchscreens before, so I’m hoping players (and you!) will respond well to it!

(I think I will work this in to my opening post, too)

Cheers,
Unislash

5

Cute little game and your ideas sound realy cool.

On thing I noticed when I tried your web demo (on pc) is that you can get stuck in the “house” between the house and the three.

Looking forward to following this project.

6

Thanks Blacknirvana

Yea, there are some pathfinding target issues when you try to pathfind into a house. It’s low on my priorities right now, but I’ll get it fixed in the next few updates.

Talking about houses, I am planning on the main economy-driving factor being focused around houses and house furniture/decoration. Different houses will have more amounts of indoor space as well as available planting areas, both being completely customizable (think indoors of Animal Crossing).

Glad to have another follower :slight_smile:

Unislash

7

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. In the month(?!) that I’ve been away, I started a great job which I’m very excited about, and began investing in more quality assets from people who are far better at making them than I am :-p. So far, the list includes…

Cartoon Nature Pack
These plants have an awesome cartooney feel! I already have some trees that I am fairly happy with, but at the very least the rocks, plants, and billboards will fit perfectly. The colors haven’t been adjusted to fit yet, and I would need to re-work my grass texture, but what do you think–should I use these cartooney trees, or the ones I currently have?

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NGUI
A GUI is coming up fast in the timeline–I must tweak/polish the control scheme, implement harvesting/pickup and an inventory, and then it’s GUI time! I took advantage of the asset store madness sale and got it half off. Looking forward to using it! Anyone have some must-read tips on the system that you wish you read earlier?

Buildings and Houses
I’m also thinking about grabbing this asset pack of houses. It has many different tiers of houses that I can use and combine, so I think it’s a good deal. It almost fits my graphics style, so perhaps there will be less tweaking the textures. On the other hand, I could drop a bit more on this pack (it’s less expensive if I only buy what I want) and get some top quality stuff that has a great style to it. I’m just worried that I won’t be able to come up with enough variations compared to the other pack :-/

Blazing-fast New Computer
My rig was getting dated; it was 6 years old sporting a Geforce 8800gt and kentsfield 6660 core2 quad @ 2.4ghz with 6 gigs of ddr2 ram. My new one is a little bit faster, and doesn’t take forever importing assets between building for web and android. Also, rendering is fun now.

So, as soon as I hit my stride at the new job, I’ll be spending an hour every day on Townsend-related activities :-). Should be next week, so expect much more development!

Edit: I’ve made a blog post with similar information to this post, and it has a webplayer demo and android apk that you can download too. Enjoy :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Unislash

8

wow it’s looking great those cartoonish assets are great

9

Thanks :-). So that’s one vote for the cartoon trees? What do you think about the houses?

Also, last night I implemented harvesting as well as a super rudimentary inventory. Looks like I’ll be learning NGUI very soon!

Cheers,
Unislash

10

Hey guys!

This week I found a lot of time to work on Townsend, and consequently I got a lot done! This week I…

  • Separated out input on the UI from input on the game area
  • Combined mouse and touch input. It was previously separated out into two functions that (I thought) shared ~80% code. Turned out it was 98% and it took me about 5 minutes to do what would have saved me about an hour throughout previous development.
  • Finished my workflow for creating screenshots of ingame assets for use in the UI
  • Used the workflow to make a good-enough icon for our default crop
  • Integrated the crop icon into the UI Atlas and button sprite
  • Figured out how to scale the UI based on the screen height so that the UI isn’t extremely small/large depending on the resolution of the window/device it’s being played on. I’m not convinced I did this right, and it will probably require tweaking later.
  • Experimented with integrating an IDE into Unity to help with programming (the code is getting kind of complex). Ended up failing with IntelliJ (as it’s Java only) and found that nothing else holds a candle to it. Reverted back to Notepad++.
  • Hooked up the Android sdk + java environment again, as this got broken when I upgraded my computer.
  • Downsampled the Cartoon Graphics texture imports. This will keep the file size low and reduce my build times in a big way.
  • Made all cartoon trees true color by toggling an attribute in the tree creator and setting the generated texture to true color

Next Up…

  • Hook in the UI to picking up crops
  • Stacks of items
  • UI x Touch interaction
  • Re-evaluate my pick up/plant/interact with controls. It’s still hard to do even after making the grid cells large (and I may need to make them even larger for gameplay balance/looks)
  • Make springy/tweeny camera. Should be interesting.

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My most recent blog post talks about all of this in detail with illustrations, and you can play the demo through the webplayer or download the android apk for it and run it right on your phone or tablet.

Things are moving right along. Soon enough I’ll have a working inventory that you can interact with, sell from, and add to. From there I’ll work some more on the game scene by incorporating houses (models TBD from an earlier post) and objects from the cartoon nature pack as well as a bunch of billboards, and there will really be an immersive world to play in!

Cheers,
Unislash

11

Looking awesome, mate!

12

Thanks Fuzz!

Question: Do you read my blog when I post? If so, do you find the blog posts interesting as a Unity user?

Also, I’m looking for ways to begin generating more traffic. Does anyone have any suggestions for what’s worked for them? I’ve read a lot of advice on the forums, but most of it is ‘start early’ or ‘use twitter’, and other not exactly helpful advice. Something more helpful would be “use twitter in this way, and do this because…” or “make sure to post to indie game wip sites, such as this, this and this” or “when you have something finished, reach out to this marketing company, I’ve had good experiences with them.”

I’d love specifics, but of course any advice is welcome :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Unislash

13

To be honest, I had not read your blog until you mentioned it in your post and yes, I found it an enjoyable read and I love following game progress.

As for traffic, I’m afraid that I can’t help much but I suggest making a facebook page and start making video updates for YouTube and facebook. I’d be happy to share it around on my facebook profile and indie group.

14

Good–I’m glad it’s a good read. Perhaps I should make it more apparent in my posts here; Unity developers are definitely a primary audience when I write them and I would enjoy explaining pieces of them in even greater detail if a fellow Unity dev asked about them. I spent so much time on the comments section expecting some questions and comments, but so far no one has used the shiny new input fields :-(. Maybe some day :slight_smile:

I do post to facebook all the time in my personal feed, and yea, if it makes it easier for people to share I’ll get right on making a facebook page. Video updates are indeed a cool thing to watch, but unfortunately they take a bunch of time too. Anything with video takes 3x longer than you think it will :-). I thought about the idea when I began developing and decided that, after I got a fair bit of traffic I’d start doing video updates, but until that time I didn’t think it would be worth the loss of dev time. Perhaps it’s a bit of the chicken vs the egg conundrum.

In any case, I would definitely appreciate you sharing my work around :slight_smile: (and anyone else who would be happy to do so as well!). I’ll get a facebook page up asap so you can easily share something around, but in the mean time feel free to retweet me (@brentg5) or share my blog address.

Thanks again for the feedback! More is always welcome.

Unislash

15

Hey guys, I thought I’d just pop in and give the link to the facebook group I made as Fuzz suggested. You’ll find it at Redirecting... and it will be updated for new blog posts (along with this post of course :slight_smile: ). Amazingly, both /townsend and /townsendme were taken… but what can you do.

Anyway, more development on the way this weekend. I’m looking to have the UI functionality all hooked up and the UI interactional. I may also get to sketching out the full UI design, because as natural as I’d like my control schme to be, I think I’m going to need some on-screen affordances. Should be fun :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Unislash

16

Hey guys,

In my last post I mentioned that there would be some new stuff this weekend, but unfortunately Halloween only comes once a year ;-). No new development this weekend. I thought I’d drop a line or consistency’s sake :slight_smile:

Fun UI stuff this week/next weekend!

Cheers,
Unislash

17

Looking forward to the next update. Liked the facebook page, too :slight_smile:

18

Heya,

This week I was focusing on hooking up the UI to the interactions I wanted. I’ll tell you, UI in Unity is tough stuff to do, even with great asset packs such as NGUI and FingerGestures. Even after spending a solid number of hours on it, I only got most of the ‘swipe down to hide the inventory widget’ functionality done. But it’ll get easier as I continue making utility functions and learning the package APIs.

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Here’s the blog post where I go into more detail about what was involved. There’s also a pretty useful script I made that’s linked in there which fits a parent’s box colliders to fit all of the children colliders regardless of the scaling going on before the parent. No demo yet, but as soon as I get the swiping fully functional, I’ll put it up in the post.

Actually fun stuff soon :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Unislash

19

So I’ve been working on the swipe functionality and the more I work on it, the more I’m beginning to think that I’m missing something key with NGUI. I probably won’t be able to get a working demo up until the weekend, and it’ll probably be all UI work (as much as I wish it would all be game content!)

The good news is that FingerGestures is super simple to learn and work with! On the other hand, right now I feel that I’m totally spoiled working with css/html (even in IE7) at work when comparing that to the complex NGUI piece I’m working with :-/. We’ll see…

Cheers,
Unislash

20

Well, I figured everything out and successfully integrated FingerGestures with NGUI. I also managed to find out what that key piece to NGUI that I was missing: a deeper hierarchy and multiple panels makes things easier. Here’s what I’ve come up with!

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It draws in one draw call, it automatically scales and centers to alleviate fragmentation woes, and you can swipe to hide or show it. Pretty sweet once it’s all together! Fortunately, I actually still needed to use most of the things I developed over the past few weeks, so there’s no loss of work there :-). If anyone is interested in getting the final version of the script that I used to make the parent’s box collider encapsulate all of its childrens’, take a look at the blog post I made a few weeks back. Also, note that most of the UI graphics here come with the NGUI examples, which is awesome.

Here’s my newest blog post where I talk about all of this in detail, along with a demo where you can try it out in the webplayer or download the apk. Enjoy! :smiley:

Next up: revisiting the terrain and using a bunch of those spiffy cartoon assets I bought a few weeks ago.

Cheers,
Unislash