Fried Flies

      



If you would like to play this on your android device, you will need to download the project, and email the Android-FriedFlies.apk, which is in the root of the project, to yourself. On your android device, just click open on the attached .apk, and it will install. If it doesn't make sure the "allow installation from unknown sources" is allowed in your application or security settings.

This was a semester long project, where we got into teams and just made a game. It was me, a producer, an artist, three designers, another programmer, and a sound designer. I came up with the basic mechanics for the game, and then we got to work.

I had only done one other project in Unity before this, so I had good idea of what I was doing.

Some cool things I learned about Unity during this project:

While we were coming up with ideas for the game, I always kept the idea that it should be playable on a mobile device, because I thought I might be able to get it on one someday. And I did. I wasn't able to test it on an IOS, because I didn't have a license, but was able to get it onto Android. That sounds really awesome, but really Unity did everything for me; all I did was change click to touch in code.

What did I do specifically on this project? Other than the art, close to everything. My other programmer did some very basic code for the main menu, UI, and a pause menu (that we later trashed, because it was only required for a milestone). I took his code and really polished it up, making the main menu use animations instead of just going to other scenes, and making the UI use pictures that have animations rather than just gui text. Other than those things, I programmed everything. Also, near the end of the project, I had some time and created a couple of levels for our game; mostly introduction to new things kind of levels.

I like the game, but I don't like the code. Sure it does the job, but it was much messier than it should have been. I created a quick prototype to show the basic mechanics for the game. After that, I just built off of the prototype, causing all sorts of problems (the big one being platform detection). I should have learned from the prototype, and then threw it away. Unity is really different, and I am still learning about how to better organize my code with it.

There is one bit of code that I am proud of, though: the AudioManager class. It is static, and has all the sounds, so if you need to play a sound, you need to go through the AudioManger. This made audio contained in a single, easy to get place. When someone asked if we could put a mute button in the game, all I had to do was add a bool to the AudioManager and it just worked. I wish the whole project would have been that smooth.