Hello, I’m fedellen and welcome to my 14th devlog! Our two main goals this week were to finish up our Apple feature submission form for Sonar Smash and to continue to develop ideas, sketches, and sprites for our unicorn runner project. I’m proud to say that as of yesterday we did get our submission form sent out.
We’ve put a lot of importance into making sure we get this form submitted 2 months ahead of time but I’m still keeping my hopes for a feature low and will be continuing to do all the marketing steps I can. As for the Unicorn Runner, we both put in a decent amount of work trying to flesh things out and things are getting pretty colorful around here 😀
Riding the Rainbow Rails
​​I’ve been having a pretty fun time putting all these rainbow rail pieces together in different combinations. In total we have 8 rainbow sections imported and functioning in-game. Many of the sections can tile with themselves and/or tile with several other pieces so I’m already able to make some pretty cool rainbow rides; which is looking especially awesome at higher speeds. During my rainbow adventures I found a speed limit where the unicorn can currently jump through the a rainbow rails but I don’t think I’m going to have everything moving that fast in any sort of real game play at the moment.
​I’ve have several questions on Discord servers about the math behind our rainbow rails so I thought I’d explain some here. A few hours were sunk into manually finding the “center y” for each X and I stored them into their own list’s. During the game play the unicorn is always comparing it’s Y to this list for any rainbow rail section which is currently on it’s X axis. If its within 24 pixels it will snap to the rainbow rail until the player boosts themselves off or until they hit the cloud at the end. I’m still playing around with the different combinations of rails I can construct and I’ll continue to polish the code.
Next Time
Looking ahead to next week our goals remain fairly open-ended. With our Apple form submission taken care we’re full steam ahead on creating unicorn runner content. The Sonar Smash community beta continues to find a few issues that I’ve been taking some time to resolve; like the recent discovery of chrome book .apks needing mouse support or adjusting music levels. A small side goal to remind myself is to work on getting a functioning Astral Defense iOS version this week. For the sake of productivity, I’ll also make the goal to import and start playing around with two obstacles for our unicorn runner, balloon guys which knock you down, and lightning traps that end your run.
fedellen, Pixel Pajama Studios
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