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StarQuail Presents Crystal Skies

Discussion in 'Made With Unity' started by StarQuail, Jun 12, 2008.

  1. StarQuail

    StarQuail

    Joined:
    Oct 9, 2007
    Posts:
    17
    After nearly two months of development, I'm happy to announce StarQuail's first Unity powered web game, Crystal Skies. Play as Bubbles, the ex-pet fish, as he bounces his way through the Great Cosmic Spinning Vortex, more commonly known as the household toilet. :p

    We're planning on submitting the game to Shockwave.com this coming Monday, so you're all invited to give it a full shakedown cruise over the next several days. If you encounter any serious problems with any of the levels or, heaven forbid, run into any bugs that we've managed to miss, please tell us! This is our first submission to an online gaming portal and we'd love to make a good impression.

    Being our first full game made within Unity, I was constantly reworking my code to better suit Unity's way of doing things. This led to the appearance of all sorts of bugs and performance issues throughout the development process, which probably added a good 2-3 weeks to our development time. That in turn forced us to drop a number of "eye candy" features from our design, such as dynamic backgrounds (had to stick with static sky boxes instead), but I'm still pretty pleased with the final look and feel of the game. It's no Sky Puppy (our previous PC-only release), but for a casual gaming portal I think it'll do. :)
     

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  2. adshead

    adshead

    Joined:
    Jul 19, 2005
    Posts:
    74
    and very atmospheric music too - well done!
     
  3. StarQuail

    StarQuail

    Joined:
    Oct 9, 2007
    Posts:
    17
    Thanks! Choosing the music and sound effects probably added another week or so to our development time, so I'm glad that at least one person likes them. If I wasn't flat broke I would have contracted all audio development out to someone who actually knows what they're doing, as we did with Sky Puppy, but this time around I put entirely too much effort into searching through websites like SoundSnaps and Shockwave-Sound. If nothing else, I'm now absolutely convinced that forking over $250-$500 to a sound guy is well worth it in terms of saving time that would be better spent programming. :)
     
  4. Lallander

    Lallander

    Joined:
    Apr 23, 2006
    Posts:
    429
    Fantastic. Gets a bit more hectic then I like in later levels, but still a blast to play. This is a lot like the chaos emerald levels from sonic the hedgehog but done with some nice new twists. Keep up the good work.
     
  5. StarQuail

    StarQuail

    Joined:
    Oct 9, 2007
    Posts:
    17
    Yup, Crystal Skies is directly modeled off of the "special stages" from the first Sonic game, but with health depleting hazards instead of exits everywhere. The game shouldn't be too overly difficult until about half way through, though mastering Bubbles' movement does take a little time. For instance, if a player hasn't figured out that they can jump off of any non-bouncy surface even when it's tilted at an 80 degree angle by the time they hit level 10 or so, then they're going to be in a lot of trouble. On the other hand, dying just resets the current level (you keep the score you had when you entered), which isn't too harsh of a penalty.
     
  6. dock

    dock

    Joined:
    Jan 2, 2008
    Posts:
    603
    Oh, you moved over to Unity also? Mike kept that one quiet! ^_~

    Great work on this!
     
  7. StarQuail

    StarQuail

    Joined:
    Oct 9, 2007
    Posts:
    17
    Yeah, I decided that if we were ever going to turn StarQuail into something profitable, then we should check out the advertising supported way of doing things. Long term development of standalone games is just too risky, as you don't know whether you've got a hit or a flop on your hands until 9-12 months after you started. Sky Puppy proved that point quite well, unfortunately. :oops:

    I eventually convinced Mike of the cold, hard economic realities of for-profit game development, so now we'll see if I was right to steer us towards the gaming portals. I'm cautiously optimistic, but then I've been wrong before. :p
     
  8. gsilverfish

    gsilverfish

    Joined:
    Jun 13, 2008
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    2
    Actually I posted about it on my LJ almost a year ago. There's even a reply from you there! XD I'm not surprised you forgot though, I have been intentionally quiet since then..
     
  9. dock

    dock

    Joined:
    Jan 2, 2008
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    603
    Oh yeah, right you are! ^_^

    Best of luck to you both. Hopefully this can take the pressure off the coding side of things a bit.
     
  10. Marc

    Marc

    Joined:
    Oct 4, 2007
    Posts:
    499
    Looks nice. The constant spinning makes me sea sick tho, but guess thats just me.
     
  11. Greymarch

    Greymarch

    Joined:
    Jun 7, 2007
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    106
    Very pretty and quite fun. The only thing that annoyed me was that if you're bouncing off the round objects that you can break, you have no jump control so if you're breaking large numbers of them you're stuck making tiny hops at the mercy of the spinning world until your spun off and into an obstacle or a regular wall or block you can bounce/jump off. Very nice though.
     
  12. StarQuail

    StarQuail

    Joined:
    Oct 9, 2007
    Posts:
    17
    Yeah, originally the fact that you couldn't jump off of the crystals was caused by a minor coding limitation, not a design one, and I had intended to work around it before release. However, we then began to build levels that took advantage of that behavior in order to provide a better challenge, so I decided to leave it in. It can be a little frustrating in a few areas, but then that's kind of the point. :wink:
     
  13. dock

    dock

    Joined:
    Jan 2, 2008
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    I just checked this out again:
    http://starquail.com/CrystalSkies/

    I hate to say thing, but it seems to crash after the first menu. If I go to high-score it doesn't let me go back, and same with the start game option.
     
  14. Colin Holgate

    Colin Holgate

    Joined:
    Jan 15, 2007
    Posts:
    263
    Marc, no, I'm sure you're not going to be the only one. I would almost take a bet that the game will get a lot of complaints from people about the constant spinning.

    It looks good, and is a strange novel variation of pinball in a way, but the constant motion stops it from being enjoyable.
     
  15. Alec

    Alec

    Joined:
    Mar 11, 2008
    Posts:
    1,330
    man, I played that for too long... my eyes hurt
     
  16. Ayce

    Ayce

    Joined:
    Jun 8, 2008
    Posts:
    101
    Kinda fun, actually, even if I get just a wee bit dizzy!!!
     
  17. 64746c

    64746c

    Joined:
    Oct 21, 2007
    Posts:
    181
    Now that's a new concept! Awesome!
     
  18. MentalFish

    MentalFish

    Joined:
    Nov 2, 2005
    Posts:
    282
    Definitely a gameplay I haven't seen before. Really cool!
     
  19. Achim

    Achim

    Joined:
    Dec 19, 2007
    Posts:
    199
    Looks great but needs a tough keyboard !