Blog

It's been a long time coming, but nevertheless: Unfinity Games 2.0 is here!

The entire website has been rebuilt from the ground up to be more in-line with modern website standards.  The forum is the least affected by all of this, but everything else (main site, product pages, this blog, etc.) have all been completely retooled and redesigned.  It took a bit of work, but the end result is well worth it, I think.  Not to mention that this is now a proper blog (with very pretty syntax highlighting -- check the archives for older articles to see it in action!).

"Why do this now?", you might be wondering.  I've got some cool stuff to share in the months ahead, and getting an updated website in place was the first step towards all of that forthcoming greatness.  There'll be more info coming soon-ish, so stay tuned!

But, for now, a new and sexy website design will have to do.

Until next time!

It's been quite a while since my last post.  A lot of stuff has happened, between being featured in a few Unity Asset Store sales, to Space Crüesader being greenlit, to the creation of a new Unity plugin, uNote.  To say that the last year has been busy would be an understatement!  A play-by-play of all of the milestones and accomplishments would be a very, very long list, so, instead, I'm going to stick to the broad strokes.

So, to sum up, here's some information on things past, and future.

• U2DEX received multiple updates, lots of praise and a featured spot in the Unity Asset Store March Madness sale
  Over the past year U2DEX has really come into its own.  Some new features were added along with various refinements to the already-existing feature-set, but the most exciting development was receiving fantastic comments like "Why is this not part of Unity?", "I can't imagine not having it now.", and "Mandatory purchase for 2D work in Unity.".
  A lot of this culminated in getting an email from the Asset Store team telling me U2DEX had been selected to participate in one of the Asset Store's sale events.  Being chosen was an amazing thing in and of itself, but the after-effects of the sale were also really great.  Word-of-mouth for U2DEX has really started to pick up, and I'm truly humbled by the response and emails I've gotten from satisfied users.  You guys rock!

• Space Crüesader was Greenlit for release on Steam
  After almost three years, Space Crüesader was finally greenlit!  Honestly, I had pretty much given up hope, but now that it's happened I'm pretty excited.  Given that Space Crüesader is about two and a half years old by now (and was heavily targeted for the Xbox 360), I made the decision to remake it in Unity, targeting PC this time.  There are numerous bonuses to this approach, but the biggest will be better cross-platform support, as well as a much better representation of what I wanted the game to be.  It'll be a lot of work, but the end result should be worth it.  This is less of a retread/remaster and more of a from-the-ground-up, version 1.5 remake -- so once it's a bit farther along, I'll be sure to share more about it.

• A new Unity plugin, uNote, was released
  uNote was released earlier this year, and already has many satisfied developers using it (including myself!).  It's a relatively simple plugin, in terms of what it does, but it's really handy to be able to drop notes wherever you need to while editing.  It's done pretty well thus far, so I'm excited to see where it goes from here.

That's the broad strokes for 2014-2015.  There's still a lot of work to be done, but overall things have been moving at a pretty brisk pace.  I've got some more stuff planned, but Space Crüesader is my priority for now.  It, too, is coming along nicely, but there is still a lot left to do.

Maybe this year I can get in more than one blog post? (Hope springs eternal!)

Until next time!

Space Crüesader version 1.0.1.0 is now out on the Xbox Live Marketplace!

There’s ton of fixes, but the #1 most important thing is that backgrounds can now be disabled entirely, if the player wants it.  Following closely at #2 is that nobody is shunned from the highscore boards if they play with backgrounds or flashes off.  Instead, they get an icon next to their entry for each thing (flashes, backgrounds) that they have disabled.

Another huge plus is that, although the Marketplace name hasn’t been changed, Bing can now find the game!  Woo-hoo!  Turns out that Bing does, in fact, look at the game descriptions, so all I had to do was remove the umlaut from the description.  Now you can find the game by typing in “Space Cr” into the Xbox’s Bing search, and it’ll give you “Space Cruesader”.  Follow that link and it’ll take you right to it!

Have fun!

If you’re interested, you can read the full, behind-the-scenes changelog below.
You might learn something!