Napland Games – Blog – Page 2 – Topics on game development by Sean Mann, co-founder of Napland Games, LLC

New blog!

Published 2016/10/17

After years of struggling with Blogger and always being disappointed in its formatting, I’ve finally switched to WordPress. So now everyone can read my posts without their eyes bleeding. I’ve carried over my subscribers, so you should all be getting new blogs right to your email. My favorite change in all of this is the ability to embed code right in the post with beautiful C# syntax highlighting!

Also, the overall look is much more legible. I hope you agree! OK, now I need to get back to studying for my Unity Certification exam next month… As always, thanks for reading…

Leave a Comment

Diagnostics

Diagnostics

Published 2016/10/05

Ever have a bright idea and think to yourself “oh, man, this is going to be so much faster”? Well, I do often, and often I find out that I’m a dummy. But that’s OK! We need to learn. So how do you find out your bright idea is as bright as a black hole? Diagnostics. The tool I tend to use most is simply the Stopwatch provided by the System.Diagnostics namespace. It’s pretty simple and provides that much-needed insight to the age-old question: “Is this method better than that method”. In this article I’ll take you through a couple…

Leave a Comment

Quick tip: Using Unity Actions to set default states on objects

Published 2016/09/16

So as I was working on a project that has a bunch of UI panels I kept forgetting to disable certain panels before running the game or before committing it and my client would see the panels with the loading screen. Sure I could add a line to the controllers I have set up to set the default state, but there’s a bunch of controllers, not all of them have the panel assigned to them at start, not all of them are disabled (some are alpha 0, some are scale 0), and it’s really best when an object maintains its…

1 Comment

Unity 3D Tutorial – Custom Transform Inspector

Unity 3D Tutorial – Custom Transform Inspector

Published 2016/08/27

Hi everyone! One of the awesome things about Unity is you can customize the editor to add all sorts of cool functionality. This article will show you how to override Unity’s transform inspector with a more useful customized version. The Custom Transform Component includes: The ability to view and edit the quaternion rotation (nice for experimenting and learning how quaternions work). The ability to show the local axes in the Scene view even when the object is not selected. Some special operations for aligning to other objects, random rotation, random scale, and random position. Here’s what the final product will…

12 Comments

Unity 3D to IBM DB2 Connection Tutorial

Published 2016/07/29

I recently had the challenge of connecting to an IBM DB2 database via Unity. After some struggles with setting up DB2 and getting the user access all correct, it ended up being fairly easy. This quick tutorial will show you how to do it and point out some of the pitfalls you might encounter along the way. Step 1 – Set up IBM DB2 To try this out you’ll need to be able to connect to a DB2 database. I didn’t have access to any so I set one up on my Windows 10 PC. Any of the DB2 installations…

3 Comments

Long Time, No See

Published 2016/07/22

Hi, everyone! I noticed a blog post is way overdue. Please forgive me, I’ve been super busy. “What have you been up to?” you ask. Well, unfortunately, no new games from Napland Games itself (though I have many in the works), but I’ve been involved with a bunch of cool projects that have kept me quite busy. My main project right now is called vuzop. It is a virtual reality data visualization tool. It can read in data from a database and create interactive visualizations where you can fly around to explore the data as it moves in real-time, sped…

Leave a Comment

For the Love of Unity

Published 2015/10/16

As many of you might know, I’ve been switched over to Unity for a year now, almost exclusively. In the past year I’ve had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects as a freelancer. This has given me a chance to check out a few different development tools such as Game Maker Studio, Cocos2d, and Xamarin. Out of all of the packages I’ve tried none of them come close to Unity. It’s clean, professional, stable, patched and updated to new tech frequently, easily extendable (the editor, Android/iOS plugins, etc), it easily ports to a bunch of different platforms,…

Leave a Comment

Gravitone!

Published 2015/10/01

Finally, the day has come! Gravitone is now available on Google Play! I apologize for all of the delays. I’ve been wrapped up in a number of client projects over the past few months and just haven’t had the time to finalize Gravitone. After a short vacation I found some time to finish it up and I’m pretty happy with the gameplay. Gravitone is an endless arcade style game that reacts to the music and has a simple goal: Push all of the orbs into the vortex that matches their color. However, things aren’t that easy! The vortexes are shrinking…

Leave a Comment

Adventures in Alternative App Markets Part 2

Published 2015/03/01

This is a continuation of a previous post which can be found here, With Sudoku In Space we tried out many new things. Among them were multiple language support, a bit of paid advertisements, and distribution among various markets. Multiple language support was quite painful, but I think for Spanish it was well worth it as we have had some fair success in Spanish speaking countries. I’m not sure if our popularity in those countries is natural or more due to running a Chartboost campaign in those countries and they have a very low Cost Per Install. Japanese and Korean…

Leave a Comment

Sudoku In Space 2.0!

Published 2014/12/02

We’ve made a lot of improvements to Sudoku In Space based on the awesome suggestions we’ve had from our users. The app has been very well received and we believe it is worthy of the extra time we’ve spent on making it as perfect as possible. We’ve had great reviews from sites and from our users. Here’s a small sample: “If you’re looking for a new way to play Sudoku, or if you’ve never played before because it hasn’t appealed to you, try this. You might be pleasantly surprised, like I was! Score: A” – Nerdy But Flirty “…pretty much blows…

Leave a Comment

Napland Games - Blog Posts