Game Dev: What Is The Objective?

Big update today and, in my opinion, long overdue!  Skipping the boring reasons why.  Official title has been selected "Slapdash Plank"!  Slapdash is another way to say the word 'random' and plank should be thematically pirate, but please decide for yourself.  So, obviously bad, don't fall off the plank, matey.

Title Screen

Slapdash Plank's objective is to use your physics knowledge, skills, and abilities to overcome your opponent.  At the start of your turn, you have to analyze the board for a good place to generate a high score, understand the physics expectation of the die about to be thrown, use the controls to set the horizontal velocity, player vertical position, and vertical velocity, and then hope you get the roll you want.  For example, if you see a plank with a 20, that is a good target unless it is surrounded by holes.  The further you have to throw the die, the greater the chance of deviation.  Anyway, I don't want to spoil all the strategies to win.  Fair warning, the computer feels like a total cheater on the hardest difficulty setting.

Game Play A

Since the beginning of June the following features have been implemented (a total of 143 changes):

• new environment (look-and-feel, which includes water and sky)
• computer player and levels of difficulty (easy, normal, and difficult)
• camera view repositioning based on mouse click (spin-to-plank)
• completed game loop (in-out and back in from title)
• mouse button actions for throwing (right-click) and top-down perspective toggle (tab or middle mouse)
• more intelligent vertical camera viewing angles (using up/down keys or mouse scroll wheel)
• triple multiplier bonus (e.g. rolling a 5 on a plank with a 5 results in 5 * 5 * 5 rather than just 5 * 5)
• game music and sounds
• more user interface features (help, credits)
• new pirate style font
• camera follow considers the distance as part of the move toward calculation
• pirate quote from Captain Oblivious to introduction
• and updated from Unity 2021.3.3 to 2021.3.7 (2022 is not LTS yet)

Game Play B

Slapdash Plank development is purposely kept quiet because I want to attempt to generate buzz about it when I am ready to consume such buzz.  That basically means little social media content until a demo is ready.  Feedback about the game so far has been positive among people I personally know and I plan to keep it that way until a beta that targets a few different platforms is available.

Top-down View

Should the beta/demo receive enough attention, I will probably focus my attention on multi-player capabilities and extend the look-and-feel to bring variety in that aspect.  Could speculate on a timeline, but since I work on this in between things, committing to such a timeline puts too much pressure on family things.

As for challenges these past few months, getting the code to calculate the shortest path around an arc limited from -180 to 180 degrees and actually take it was the most challenging.  What I had to do was determine which path was shortest, which was the easy part, but then needed to solve crossing over the zero boundary along the circular path with the same algorithm.  In the end, the arc calculation just needed 360 added or subtracted from it as a starting point.