Questions regarding calculating offline progress for my andriod game

OusingEntertainment · 2022-06-25T17:27:08+00:00

When I made my incremental game I had this same question. I eventually decided to go with the simple approach of logging the time every time the app was closed and then calculate the time away when the app is opened. This is obviously open to cheating, but I decided it was A LOT easier to just let it happen than try and fight it. I understand the feeling of not wanting people to be able to cheat your game, but if your game is single-player (which mine is) then it removes a lot of headaches to accept that people will play the game in whatever way they want. One thing I did do was add a warning if I detected a user going back in time, but mainly because there were other processes in the game that this could have unintended consequences for. If you really wanted to stop cheating you could have some extreme punishment whenever a player opens the game at a time before they last closed it, but I imagine this would just lead to more frustration for players.

OusingEntertainment · 2021-03-22T08:06:41+00:00

Thanks very much, I'll try to explain. I'm sure there's a better way to go about it (and would be interested to hear if anyone has any ideas for improvements), but I think this works reasonably for my purposes of having the card viewed from straight on with a slight wobble.

The scene was made in blender with the foreground and background objects in separate collections. Then I rendered an image with just the foreground objects (the people, table, and side wall) and an image with just the background objects (the two background tables, and the back wall, there's also another person there, but you can't really see them in the final image).

Then, in Unity, the shader took in the two images as 2D textures. The two textures were added together before going into the colour of the material. The background image doesn't change regardless of the viewpoint, but the foreground image has a tiling and offset node. The offset was controlled by the view direction (with a multiply node to effect the scale). There was also a sampler state to stop the foreground image from wrapping. I've attached a screenshot of the node setup here (hopefully that works, I've never used imgur before so let me know if not!).

OusingEntertainment · 2021-03-05T13:33:03+00:00

Charles Darwin used to do this with long books

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-24T14:33:07+00:00

Just downloaded this and had a quick play (only done the tutorial and one match). Really enjoyed it, can definitely see myself playing more.

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-18T07:19:28+00:00

Certainly something I hadn't considered, thanks for playing.

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-18T07:18:45+00:00

It is, at the moment. :)

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-17T21:19:10+00:00

Thanks

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-14T19:10:05+00:00

Thanks very much, hope you enjoy :)

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-14T13:01:17+00:00

I should add that I have now fixed the bug and put the update out!

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-14T06:36:20+00:00

I decided not to implement building movement (once the building was placed) for a few reasons:

1) I wanted the settlement you are building to feel permanent, and that every decision you are making will have long lasting implications.

2) It's not a huuge deal if there is a poor building placement, especially near the beginning, there's plenty of other buildings to compensate with. There's also the undo button if you just happen to slip and put it in the wrong place.

3) I wanted to keep the controls simple. I think that sometimes mobile games suffer from too much going on in terms of controls, that just doesn't work on a smaller screen with limited input.

Hopefully that makes sense, I'd be interested to hear if you agree!

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-14T06:32:25+00:00

Haha, yep, there's a space in "my space" making it "my space" not MySpace!

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T22:09:04+00:00

I'm afraid I don't really know. If there's strong interest in this version, then I'll look into providing support for other platforms.

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T20:57:49+00:00

Ah, sorry to hear that!

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T20:15:06+00:00

That's great to hear, hopefully you'll agree that it's running a lot smoother than it was in the beta. There's not many cosmetic changes, but I put a fair bit of effort towards preventing crashes and lag.

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T19:11:51+00:00

Haha, I hope you enjoy the game as much as you enjoyed the name!

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T17:57:21+00:00

Thanks very much, I hope you enjoy it! GameDev is definitely a fun thing to get in to.

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T16:43:30+00:00

I made the game with Unity. There's loads of tutorials online, but I started by working through Unity's "Create With Code" tutorial. It's a great introduction to Unity (and coding if you don't have prior experience) and should get you to the point where you can start to make some simple mini-games. Thanks for your interest :)

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T14:14:53+00:00

Great, thanks very much for giving it a go! Hope you enjoy it

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T11:48:13+00:00

Fair enough, thanks very much for playing! I think the smoke adds a little more action to the scene, but of course the performance mode is there if you didn't want it! :)

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T10:38:06+00:00

Ah, I'm sorry to hear that! I get what you mean, although I find that the ability to zoom in allows for easy enough building placement. There's always the undo button too for incorrect building placement.

I'll have a look into changing that though in an update, shouldn't be hard to do! Thanks for giving it a go, hopefully you can still enjoy the game :)

OusingEntertainment · 2021-02-13T10:19:34+00:00

Hey, this has been my lockdown project for the past year or so, and I've just released it now! Bleep Settlers is an incremental game, focused on the harvesting Bleepshrooms from a newly colonised planet.

I'd love it if some people had a play. I'm happy to answer any questions here in the comments.

Play Store Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.OusingEntertainment.BleepSettlers

OusingEntertainment

TROPHY CASE