Tag / Microcosm Framework

Global Game Jam 2018 Header
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Global Game Jam 2018

Having spent the past 2 months working on both the Microcosm Framework and Super Blasty Blasty V2, I felt that I needed a bit of a change of pace and decided to join in with #GlobalGameJam2018. This was the perfect opportunity to put the framework into action with a fresh project that could be far smaller scope than Super Blasty Blasty V2. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any time on the Friday or Saturday to take part but I wasn’t ready to let that stop me taking part, so on Sunday morning, I set myself a challenge to get something built and “released” in 12 hours.

Needless to say, this was a bit ambitious. But I did it! My initial plan had been to get a fully polished release on the Google Play Store in these 12 hours, looking back this was a ridiculous goal. The version I quote unquote released was far from polished, but it was functional on Android devices and had some great features, mostly thanks to the Microcosm Framework doing its job exceptionally well in saving me development time.

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30daydev plan header image
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#30DayDev January

Sometime during 2016, I helped my friend Liam Twose found the hashtag #30DayDev and push it to become of the most widely used game development hashtags on Twitter with a huge number of people actively taking part and even more people seeing the content being developed by the hashtags ever-increasing reach. However, throughout 2017 activity wained as algorithms on hashtags were changed and focus was directed elsewhere into other endeavours. We decided it would be a good thing for the game development community at large to try and revive the hashtag going into the new year and this is what this post will cover, my plan of action for the first #30DayDev of 2018.

This month will be the first month I’ve gone into with a solid plan of how to tackle #30DayDev pretty much since its inception. I’m not solely focusing on game development this month with some time being dedicated to trying to help revive the hashtag as well. I’m essentially splitting my 30 days into 3 tasks; Twitter Bot, Super Blasty Blasty V2 and knowledge sharing. Between these 3 tasks, I think I should be able to learn a fair few new things as well as produce some quality content.

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Header image for the Microcosm Framework
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The Microcosm Framework

Over the course of my past few game development projects, I’ve had to write a lot of code multiple times and every time I’ve been slightly more inconvenienced by it. This ends up wasting valuable time that could be spent doing fun stuff. So I decided enough was enough and I’d create a reusable framework for use with all of my future projects. The premise was simple, I’d outline a set of basic requirements that every project I work on will have and then create a unity package I can import at the start of development to avoid having to try bodge implementations from other projects into a new one.

The initial requirements were simple; a menu system, basic AdMob integration, generic object pooling and simple game management systems to track state/play sounds/etc. These were picked as the requirements because they were the things that I had found the most tedious to set up fresh in every project. However, as I began implementing these features it dawned on me that this limited scope would definitely need to be expanded, what if I wanted Analytics in my games? I would need to first update the framework and then update the package in all subsequent projects it was used in. With the thought of a tedious upgrade process in mind, I went back to the drawing board for my requirements. The final scope was far bigger but added far more value to my future projects, these components and why I chose them are explained in detail below.

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