Sealife Scramble

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Sealife Scramble is a 2d sidescroller made in Unity3d for iOS and Android. Same as my previous project Stix this game was made alongside a small indie team called Big Red Planet. I was the game designer and programmer for this title.

In Sealife Scramble you take the role as a Seahorse swimming for his life as he’s chased by a big, evil, mechanical creature. If the creature catches you, then it’s game over. Along the swimming route is different obstacles, like mines, torpodoes, and squids. If you collide with an obstacle you’ll be placed in a panic mode which slows you down, and makes the creature slowly catch up to you. The goal is to beat your Facebook friends highscore by swimming the furthest.

Facebook has been integrated using the Unity Facebook SDK. Thus allowing users to log into their Facebook account and compete against their friends. And if the user doesn’t currently have any friends playing the game, then there’s the option of sending an app request to chosen friends.

When developing Sealife Scramble we found it necessary to implement our own database solution. In doing so we used the Parse for Unity SDK, which easily integrated into both Android and iOS. When logging into Facebook, users would automatically be logged into Parse using their Facebook autherization. This would make sure that a user’s Parse account would be correctly associated to their Facebook account. Which was important when querying for highscores which only included a certain user’s Facebook friends.

At the end of the first development iteration we wanted to experiment with rewarded video ads. So we downloaded Unity ads and integrated it into the project. Whenever a user was caught by the creature, the user would be presented with the option to view a video ad to escape the creature and keep on playing. Thus allowing a user to get a higher score by viewing an ad.

Android app on Google Play

While You Wait

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While You Wait is a cross-platform application developed in Xamarin Studio. It’s been released for Android and iOS.

The main focus was to make a “wait in line” or “queue”  application aimed at restaurants, hairdressersor or similar. The main use-case would be as following; The waiter at the restaurant doesn’t have any free tables, so the waiter would enter a customers mobile number and name. This would place the customer in a queue and also notify the customer by SMS. Whenever a table would become available the waiter would send a notification by SMS to the customer.

The application is constructed using different APIs. It’s using an online database, Parse, which integrates seamlessly into Xamarin through the component store. And Twilio which is used for the SMS part of the application. Twilio offers a REST API that accepts the applications queries to send SMS to the customers.

The application is taking advantage of Xamarin’s new tool; Xamarin.forms. These tools makes it way easier to develop a cross-platform applications. Xamarin uses the Mono runtime and already let’s you share business logic on many platforms through a PCL or Shared project. However, what Xamarin.forms allows you to do is to share your UI code cross-platform as well. Forms is only compatible on Android, iOS, and Windows phone (as of August 2015) which is perfect if you’re a mobile developer 🙂