Now, you listen 'ere.

Spent some time recently adding a tutorial to my game; at the moment it is just a box at the bottom of the screen which changes every level explaining the different aspects of the game, I've tried several different ways of doing it but I think I'm on the right lines now. Anyway, when I've finished adding in all the text I hope to add a close button and to make it generally look a bit prettier than it does at the moment. I've had to change some levels slightly and split some levels into multiple levels in order to ease people in a little slower.

Iconic Implimentations

Okay, so throughout the weekend I spent a lot of time creating icons for my game; I decided a long time ago that I wanted/needed icons on my hubs to indicate to the player what the hubs where and a sort of indication of what they did. I also wanted an additional indication of how charged the end hubs are.
after playing around a bit I had to increase the size of the centre of the hubs again so that the icons in the middle were more visible.

This Is the start hub, standard battery to depict that it's charged/source of power

 

This is the end hub - an empty light-bulb to show that it needs to be powered, - the level of the inside rises the closer the hub is to being fully powered.

This is a standard hub; it's just a picture of a connection/extension lead; I researched for better icons to use, but this seemed the most fitting.

This is the colour combiner hub - it's basically a mixer. I thought about changing the sliders depending on what inputs are added, that might be something to add after testing. I would have liked to add colours to the sliders, or icons in general, but I thought that the colours would confuse the colours over the ACTUAL colours of the inputs and outputs.

This is the splitter hub, self explanatory  it seems less complicated than the other icons, so i might need to increase its quality at some point.

Additionally the hubs can be coloured: as I said before, colours might confuse the player, but I could always add in an option to change the colours in an options menu or something. the set colour will have to be determined after i have textured the hub itself (which I think I'll have to do soon)

Rock and Scroll

I spent some of today working on my dissertation ,after fixing some bugs on the new wire objects I realised that all of the floppy wires everywhere made the game just as confusing as when they were not in, However, Chris pointed out that the main problem was that the unlinked wires were draping everywhere and making it confusing, I added in some code to disable the wire unless it was being dragged or was already linked and this seemed to fix it very well.

Additionally I fixed the scrolling  to make it easier to use. Now the player can scroll by moving the mouse around then the middle mouse button is pressed down. eventually I think it would be nice to add in different cursors to symbolise the current actions you are taking, but for now I am quite happy with what I have come up with.

Oh, I also played around with what areas of the models are colour coded to make it easier to see, and found a small bug where the plug turns black when you place it on an "any" socket in the process. So I'll have to fix that soon. apart from that, I will try tutorial next I think - I will try not to put off unity's GUI's any longer.

Wire You Staring At Me.

I've spent pretty much the whole of my spare time in the weekend making the physics based rope for this game.

In the end I didn't actually spawn the rope dynamically through code - It was too fiddly and it is hard to get ordering right (things have to be done at certain times otherwise it doesn't work at all). Instead I placed all of the physics hinges into the output I've made, and then when it spawns I draw over the invisible hinge positions to make it look like rope.

The drawing and updating script was made completely from scratch - it updates everything and colours the wire according to how it should be, then positions to end of the wire to either the mouse, or the hub it's connected to (even has destruction code). The drawing code is partly done by a plugin I found which is basically a slight improvement (in terms of functionality and lag) to the line renderer which already comes with unity(which is what i would have used if I hadn't found it)

the physics of the rope will have to be tampered with in order for it to have the desired effect, and the texture made to look less bland, but apart from that I'm very happy (minus the past 48 hours of frustration)

Plain white wire, just clicked.

green and red wire connected (and settled, because it currently jiggles for a while after moving)

I think I will re-do the camera movement next, it's the next biggest thing, The biggest I had to do was the physics wire, so it shouldn't be so bad from now.