The timer is giving me fits.

For a programmer, doing what I want to do is probably remedial stuff, but I’m finding it less than simple.  Given a longer production cycle, I would continue trying to sort it out, but with a 1 month deadline (of which 3 weeks are left) I am wasting hours in the rabbit hole.  Hours I can ill afford to waste.

The issue is one of dynamic fonts.  See, iOS doesn’t support scaleable fonts out of Unity.  This means that I have to bring in a custom static font for iOS.  Which isn’t a big deal.  But then, when I push the game to Android, that font is going to have to be manually adjusted for each screen, which kind of defeats the purpose of developing in Unity, which is that the game can be pushed cross-platform with a minimum of mucking about.

The solution we have used in the past is to build all of our GUI elements out of game objects.  For the timer, however, this is not so simple.  now I have to build an actual mechanical timer, something that swaps textures or animates the number switching.  This can be done, but it involves even more complex coding.

So I have set aside the timer issue for now and moved to things that should give me a greater degree of visible, physical progress on the game.  If I have the TIME (hur dur) to work on the timer later, I will, but right now it has been moved from the “want” list down to the “nice to have” list.

Yeah.  So there was this E3 thing.  I didn’t get as much done as I wanted, but there has been quite a bit of progress.  Because I am working with what is essentially a modular game, I am working on getting everything working properly in the first level, from there is should be mostly assemblage.

I have a good rough mockup in Unity3d at this point, I’m attaching the screenshot below.  I am attempting to use uScript for the lions’ share of my programming, but there are just some things that only good ‘ol C# seems to be able to do the way I want it done.

My current bit of hair-pulling is the timer, which records how quickly you finish the level.  It’s counting up in milliseconds (which is why the big, fat number on the right) I need to get it to display a bit better.

All mu GUI elements are being created using masked 3d planes, rather than the GUI interface.  Since I am going to multiple platforms with this, scaleability is an issue, and I don’t have the math-fu to build out a GUI in code that will adapt to the changes in interface.  By working with game objects rather than GUI rects, the different elements scale perfectly and remain in the same relationship no matter what the screen size or format.

A screenshot can be found at the link here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106703584505799913797/albums/5752103618530904945/5752103622061980898