So here we are at the shiny new start of Week 03 for NaGaDemo.  I kinda thought I would be farther along by now, to be honest, but I didn’t take into account the sheer volume of RL stuff I have to handle, especially here at the end of the school year for the Three Things.  Now that Mom’s Taxi Service is on hiatus for the summer (or at least is operating on reduces hours) I am hoping I can get some epic levels of stuff done in the last two weeks.

That said, I have a working version of the first level (woot!) up and running.  It counts score (I solved the issue with using 3d textures to handle the scorekeeping and timer thanks to some Google-Fu and some digital sticky-tape) it keeps time, there are flashy lights.  Next up are the transitional elements, I have 25 levels and need to set up keeping track of which levels have been completed so that the game doesn’t completely reset every time it gets restarted.

Ah, and another, incremental screenshot for you here…

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.