ShabbyMcCrabby pointed me to this thread from a post I made in the iOS Gaming thread, and suggested I also posted here to let you know about a game I've made.

It's called Kiln and is for Android and iOS, it costs 69p, and is an updated take on the ball and paddle type game (think Arkanoid and Breakout). 

It is motion controlled and features 85 challenging levels, starting with a very basic level and moving through levels with scrolling screens, multiple paddles, dynamic 3 dimensional effects and bullet balls (although I call the balls 'pucks' as they are square not spherical).

There is (imho) quite a lot of content there and if you (miraculously - best I've managed so far is 1 to about 60) manage to play it through to the end in one game it will take ~3.5 hours. Progress is saved on completion of every 5 levels (i.e. complete level 5 and you can restart a game at level 6, complete level 10 and you can restart at level 11 etc).

The promotional video can be seen here



And it available on iOS here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kiln/id569011001?mt=8
and Google Play here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bleatbleat.kiln

For mobile play, it'd be nice if it saved after fewer levels; if you're right at the end of the fifth just as you have to get off the train it's frustrating having to start.

Other than that, it's a solid game; I like breakout games, grabbed it from Play. I'd normally ask for touch control, but the aim mechanic wouldn't be as satisfying without the physical aspect of it.

Oh, that sounds okay. Presumably it'll let me continue when it's put into the background and then the system closes it because it needs the memory? That's very likely to happen.

Ooh Kiln look dandy.What did you code it in?

gamerluke wrote:

Tidy and impressive looking graphics you have there for your marble game LazyGunn.

cheers! i'm a mega graphics nerd and chiefly an artist rather than a programmer so that becomes my dealio

talking of marble game, its now free, look for the fancy one  or ogles 1.1 version under 'flarble badness' on google play store, have fun. i suppose it still isnt technically finished i keep getting distracted by my billion and a half ongoing unity projects (why im not around much on internets) but yeah, enjoy!

luke what physics did you use? some fellows mostly ported box2d over and ive read about plans for a bullet physics port too, im assuming you wrote your own however

unity 4 has actually got me really excited about graphics things and i've been doing all sorts of reading on the matter, including a GREAT set of videos on shader writing that have me super inspired by the guy's BDRF, half lambert + rim and oren nayer shaders. these arent even new ideas but yes, am super inspired, currently modelling a really over-ambitios buggy thing that is intended to be able to switch into walker and heli modes with intricate animation. headache. but yeah, it'll be like a cross between Walker and SWIV on t'amiga (and im still doing chase hq thingy but waiting on a few things, and my other thing, mainly relearning how to model decently atm though however)

great news about win mobile support in unity, they've added linux and i assume improved on flash support in 4, so if they can break webgl then it's about as complete a solution i can think of, great news indeed for the indie community

Unity uses the PhysX engine, which is a powerful physics engine and supports 3D, whilst I don't believe box2D supports 3D it is possibly slightly faster from a performance perspective. However, I didn't feel either would suit Kiln as they both rely on discrete checks and are optimised to provide approximations of real world behaviour. I found that (with very fast moving items) even with the physics timestep set to very small values collisions were still occasionally being missed and collisions were sometimes being detected on the wrong side of an object.
  I therefore didn't use  physics at all for the core gameplay. Every frame the code works out how far an item should move, and checks for collisions recursively (using Unity's raycast call) until the item has moved the correct distance (various bounding box checks are used in places as well), then the item's position is updated. This allowed for complete control of the arcade style movement I wanted for the ball and paddle. I do attach rigidbodies to the destroyed brick fragments and use forces on those as it was easier and hopefully more efficient.
 I agree, Unity 4 looks great. The number of platforms they are going to support is quite something.

Makes sense! Probably a bit too heavy for me i like making things prety mainly, which has gotten heavy, suddenly, as in how do i blur a cubemap in a shader etc. Conquered transcribing oren nayar from youtube however and unity surface shaders dont seem too terribly hard sometimes, bit like compositing in photoshop once you have a lighting model. I may eat my words. Great work anyways, its good seeing how theres always many options open other than the ones unity provide. Unity 4 free is in beta now by the way, you might want to take a look.

Hi LazyGunn (or anyone else who can answer it), just a quick question regarding (free) unity3.5 vs unity4....i'm still yet to embark on my new project* really, and have now forgotten almost all of the small amount of unity knowledge i had, but I was wondering whether to stick with 3.5 or jump to 4.  basically, is 4 better in every way, or is there stuff from 3.5 that has either been made 'premium' or over-complicated in the new version?  looking at it from the 'ease of getting started' angle rather than 'the most AAA that the end result could possibly look'!

* 'project' is a little mis-leading.  more accurate would be 'one of the various ideas that flit about my head that i keep thinking "one day i'll try to make a game in unity"'!

Cheers lazygunn. Hope you had an enjoyable drunken evening!

great work on the port shabby, although it seemed relatively painless, ive got a lot of suggestions regarding getting it running more quickly on an iphone 4, well, hopefully at least get the fps to 25+ or so

great work though man and much appreciated, you and skerret can figure out how youd like to deal with it, we can probably implement the system specific features, me finish the tutorial, and add the last few UI touches (like sensitivity control etc)  and its good!

stuffs looking fun on the horizon regarding android stuff for me, you ios guys are now obviously invited to get it running on the apple platforms, rosy things indeed!

now we need a win8 person

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haha that was good fun

You could prob remake angry birds entirely using Ragespline or Uni2D from the asset store

That's more what I'm thinking. Will all be coders so scrips better than libraries...

That said, it could be argued that one of Unity's strengths is its extensibility and collection of great 3rd party libraries