XBox Development Update
5/17/2019
I've been hard at work on the Xbox One port for Jet Fighter Neon. Most of the last month was spent experimenting to integrate Xbox Live services into the game so that we can make use of the Xbox's connected storage. Unfortunately, all those experiments were utter failures. I talked it over with my development partner, and we've come up with a new plan that I think may actually bring about more of that old nostalgia feeling.Unfortunately, that plan hasn't been put into place, so I'm not yet at liberty to discuss the details, but I can tell you what has been done. The current design of the shop and upgrade selection screens works great for android, but doesn't work for Xbox. As a result, I've embarked on an epic journey to completely rewrite all the UI in the game. This had to be done. Unfortunately, as we discovered, the Unity Scroll bars don't exactly work as expected on Xbox, so we're planning on replacing all scroll bars with pagination. It'll work better, and hopefully will look nicer too. In part of facilitating this UI overhaul, we've added a few new Unity assets to our toolbelt. We selected DoozyUI for handling all the UI stuff. Working with DoozyUI, we found that it has the ability to integrate with PlayMaker and Master Audio. Naturally, we want the best for our game, so we bought those assets too, and have incorporated them into Jet Fighter Neon for Xbox. The timing couldn't have been better actualy, as we just recently discovered that the asset we normally use for audio management doesn't work with the newer versions of Unity. As we upgraded to the new audio asset, we discovered some things about it that we really love, that our old asset could not do. For instance, we can now give you more than just three volume controls in the options screen. With the old asset we could only provide you Master Volume, Music Volume, and Sound Volume. Master Audio allows us to provide you as many sound volume controls as we need. For instance, our next game may provide volume controls for things such as: Ambient Sound, Sound Effects, Music, Vocals, UI Sounds, etc.
One unfortunate draw back from using DoozyUI is that it doesn't currently have integrations with the ReWired asset. We've been using the ReWired asset to allow us to poll input from the Xbox controller. Sure, its not really necessary, but it does make things 1000% easier, since it automatically handles various conditions for us, like controller disconnects, and a player swapping out controllers. Thankfully though, it wasn't really that difficult for us to recode all the parts of DoozyUI that polled for input to use the ReWired asset. We've spoken with the DoozyUI developers, and they advised us that a future version will include ReWired support out of the box. Anyways, that's it for this month's update. I'm going to dive back into coding land and get more done for next month's update. Until then, happy gaming!