Facebook leaderboard as seen in The Crazy Program on Android.

 I got a lot of feedback from my friends testing our new mobile game The Crazy Program. One thing that came up a few times was a request to have a high scores table to compete with your friends. I created a quick Facebook App version of Donut Get! last Fall and knew it wouldn’t be too much work with Facebook’s built in high scores functionality.

Facebook allows you to save high scores for your app without needing any backend. The caveat is that you can only save one score per user. So this works decently for a global high score for your game, but not so well if you have different levels and different modes. Facebook’s scores API will also return a list of your friends that are playing, in order of rank. This makes it very easy to hit the ground running with some social features.

Prime31 Social Networking Plugins for Unity

I decided to purchase the Prime31 Social Networking plugins to handle the communication between Facebook and Unity. I had a good experience with their in-app purchase plugins and the support was good. There were other options for Facebook plugins but they either weren’t for both Android and iOS or I couldn’t tell whether or not they could handle posting high scores. Some plugins seemed to just handle basic Facebook connect features, or at least this was the impression I got.

Prime31 Social Networking demo scene

I started development on Android. The example scene is straightforward and I got connected with my Facebook App fairly quickly.

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I ported DONUT GET! to OUYA with the hope of it being a OUYA launch title. I anticipated that it would at least help bring a bit more attention to DONUT GET!, especially since it didn’t get as much coverage as expected. Fortunately DONUT GET! was listed as one of the 104 OUYA launch titles, and mentioned on sites like Destructoid.

We’ve made our download stats available for DONUT GET! on OUYA. It’s a totally free game — there’s no in-app purchases.

Our DONUT GET! OUYA Download stats are available here: http://www.donutget.com/ouya-stats/

A large problem within the OUYA community is that the company is slowly trickling out the ~60,000 Kickstarter units. For developers it’s a bit unsettling with the low download numbers, and the myriad of other software problems we’re dealing with. Continue Reading…

ANNOUNCING — DONUT GET! for Android Has Been Released!

Download it for FREE at:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sokay.DonutGet

Last week I spent some time prototyping our next game in Unity. Of the block matching puzzle game variety.

This week I jumped back to focusing on Donut Get! iPad version and finishing up where I left off with the in app purchasing. I was running into a problem of it just crashing when a purchase started so I had to do a bit of optimizing to prevent that. So far so good, as now I can at least get it to work!

In app purchase screen to remove ads.

Thank you screen!

The textures for the sprite animation is eating up a ton of memory. I’ve tried to keep the cop animation sharp and crisp but I’ve had to bring down the res a bit to accommodate all the lower-end devices it keeps crashing. 🙁 So for now, I’m trying to stop crashing Android phone! haha

Later I hope to do some research to switch between spritesheets based on the memory available on the device. Not quite sure if that’s possible/reasonable yet.

Donut Get! Android is available on Google Play so check it out if you can. Let me know how it works for you!

iPhone version available soon!

The OG Flash version still at http://www.sokay.net/play/donut-get

Thanks for reading.

Peace!

Ok, I had a hell of a time figuring out how to load in XML for a Unity project I’m working on and use it to build a level. Fortunately the Unity Community is vibrant and helpful, even though you may have to do digging to find what you’re looking for. It can be difficult getting started, especially when working in C# as many of the examples are coded in Javascript.

Here’s an example of some game xml:

Keep in mind that there’s a million ways to go about doing this. I tried to justify why I did it this way, and the best I can say is “I just felt like it.” Haha!

I ended up using a C# port of this Lightweight XML parser. The benefit of it supposedly is that it’s only 8k compared to a megabyte or so that would be added if you used the native C# class, System.XML. I used the C# port by chirhotec in this post. I had to make a small change, commenting out the “string nodeContents” line because the variable wasn’t used.
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