I was reluctant to write about this project as it was still on going and there appeared to be enthusiasm for it, however I think it's safe to say it's dead now and I'd like to discuss what it was and why I enjoyed it.
Recently I've been attempting to create a simple phone game with my uni friends in our spare time. This game is a vertical-scrolling shooter dubbed 'Star Light'. Another space shooter you might think but it started life as a port of SuperNova. However, I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I would get some more people on board and see if I could tackle a 2.5D shooter for mobiles.
I jumped right in at the deep end and didn't do pretty much any planning. I created a basic rectangle that shot balls and a background that scrolled using a plane set to scroll a specific way in unity. This seemed to work for a while but I decided that because I'd been so quick at getting this all working I could go for a more complex arrangement and get a proper 3D background going. So I went to work on that idea and have currently still not been able to get to do exactly what I wanted.
One of the friends I got on-board with me helped create a menu system that works really well with a pause and a opening screen that allows the player to change certain options with a setting menu. While primitive, it looked great due some of the background we managed to create with some orbiting planets and a nice backdrop.
Another friend created two ships one a player and the other an enemy that looks really great.
After this we moved forward adding an animation to the ship and using it in Unity (a first for me and them with 3D models). I managed to get a system for spawning in random obstacles in place and we got a 3D model of asteroids from someone else on the project and spent several hours sorting out a particle system for the ships exhaust.
It was moving quite fast and in a positive direction and then the winter break happened. We all had a huge amount of course work and personal time to sort out so things just stopped. And now going back for semester two we have the final group project for the year.
So it seems this will be a forever half finished idea. It's a shame but it's taught me quite a bit about mobile game development, least the setup required and how to program for inputs on those devices. Also the great way Unity and android link to make use of any android device for testing is a dream for any developer. While I still need to do more research on how to dynamically scale resolutions dependant on phone screen size, I'm glad this was something we did and I felt like I learnt a lot from it.
My take away here is that if you don't try, you'll never know. And if you do try, you'll probably learn something cool along the way.