Development Update:

I finally submitted my first asset to the Unity Asset Store... Floating Combat Text by EckTech Games is now in the Pending Review status... And holy crap did that take forever! Deciding on good names, cleaning up the code, and reorganizing my code took its own chunk of time. But coming up with graphics, setting up a YouTube channel, writing documentation, writing a tutorial, building demo scenes, taking screenshots, and making sample videos took most of the damn week. I constantly felt like I was just a few hours of work away so I wound up trying to push through to the end, but I kept running into minor road blocks along the way. As a result I wound up putting in 10-12 hour days until I finally submitted it on Thursday. I feel like I just got done with the Week of Awesome. But it's up now! Huzah!



Here's what I generated this week:

• Publisher Page - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/publisher/15162
  
• Asset Page - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/42253 (Won't be visible until the asset gets approved)
  
• Playable In Game Action Demo - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v4sefmee5rzrz0w/FloatingCombatTextActionDemo.html
  
• Demo Scene - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/bqmxrrrnue6op63/FloatingCombatTextDemoScene.html - provided with the asset
  
• EckTech Games YouTube Channel and 3 videos - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLI2xCbX3KemvwUrCFdkMpCbScAPidhZe
  
• Setup PayPal
  
• Oh yeah and the code...
  
  My wife was in charge of the cool graphics and branding work. I gave truly inspirational guidance like, "Nah, I don't like that." and "Yeah, that's cool." Eventually she came up with something that I think looks like a pretty slick logo:
  
  
  I languished over the pricing for it. I found two similar modules for sale, one for $10 and one for $20. The $10 didn't seem very featureful and had 5 ratings meaning at lest 5 people bought it (maybe more?). The $20 was used in a game and seemed more professional. It had more features, but it was also slave to a $100 gui replacement asset. But it was rated by 186 people, so at least that many people felt it was worth $20. In the end, I decided to go with $15. We'll see how it goes.
  
  Next week I plan to get back to some game development. This business nonsense is for the birds! I'm going to toy around with some different game mechanics for movement. I haven't decided between grid based or free form - definitely turn-based though. If I can't decide on a movement style, I'll probably add a couple more weapons types instead. Missiles or Fighter Bays. Something that launches a projectile that participates in the combat. And since I finally shipped my asset, I'm going to have to start back on the laminate floors for the kitchen.
  
  

  Tips from your Uncle Eck:

  
  Wordpress... I had done some research on Wordpress and saw how there were multiple ways to host Unity games in Wordpress sites. Sweet! So I decided to be professional and I shelled out $100 for a year, and started up my blog. About a week later, I found out that none of these hosting ideas work on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com is locked down pretty tightly: you can't install plugins, you can't run javascript, and you can't use iframe elements. But what obfuscated this fact is that Wordpress is an open source blogging software project and it supports this functionality... Also, there's a site wordpress.org that supports this and so several other developers "use wordpress" to host Unity packages. ARGH! I'll probably still use WordPress as a web log and asset showcase, but I was still frustrated.
  
  I did figure out how to host my demos through dropbox. It has some limitations, but you can't beat the free price.
  Step 1: Set your build to the Web Project and build the package.
  Step 2: Name your html files and unity package files appropriately.
  Step 3: Upload these files to a dropbox account.
  Step 4: Get their public links. Should look something like:
  www.dropbox.com/s/random-wierd-text/YourGameName.html?dl=0
  www.dropbox.com/s/random-wierd-text/YourGameName.unity3d?dl=0
  Step 5: Edit the Unity generated html file. Instead of referencing "YourGameName.unity3d" directly, replace it with the changed url:
  dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/random-wierd-text/YourGameName.unity3d
  Step 6: From elsewhere, you can now link to the changed url
  dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/random-wierd-text/YourGameName.html
  
  I bolded the parts of the url you should change for the direct reference links. The main limitation is the bandwidth limit for free accounts. By default, you get 10 gigs of download bandwidth per day. I wired up my Floating Combat Text to the Survival Shooter unity project as a pretty demo which is around 50 megs. It's simple as far as games goes, but it has nice graphics, models, and sounds that take up a decent chunk of space. That's only 200 users per day. For a game with any popularity, it's not a real solution. But I think it will be fine for my immediate needs.