Getting Started

The game of thirty six was chosen as my first game that was created using my Game in a Day rules. This means that the game was created in a single day using only code and assets that were created that day or were used in a previous episode from which I used no code. While Tennis with Dice is my first true episode, and was created in under 24 hours, the work on that was spread out over a couple of days. Likewise, no diary was kept so this is the first episode with a development diary. With that intro out of the way, lets get to the diary.

Bringing up Photoshop to create 6 images (one for each side of the die) was my first step. Any graphics program could have be used, but I own a copy of Photoshop so why not use it? I wanted dice that looked marbled, and I wanted them to be purple to stay within the Blazing Games color theme. Creating a grain texture that looked like a purple marble was easy. Layers made it easy to add the dots for the numbers. I kind of wanted a brushed metal for the dots, though instead of using blue-gray for the dots I stuck with my color theme.

The dice need to be created. Because I know that I am going to need different types of dice (while all of them will be six sided, what appears on the sides may not always be the numbers one through 6). Also, at some time I might create a 3D dice and want that to work exactly the same way as the regular dice so a generic dice interface is needed to make the transition, if it happens, easy. This IRoll interface is fairly simple and provides ways of getting or setting the dice value, starting and stopping the rolling animation, and quickly rolling the die without any animation.

With the main interface for using the die out of the way, a standard die needed to be created. What better name than SixSidedDie. If I do the 3D version it will use the obvious name of SixSidedDie3D, but that is not going to happen today. Today's game is going to be strictly 2D for the dice. While I could have animated frames simulating the rolling of the die, for the 2D version of the die I went with the most basic randomly changing the number method of animating the roll. This will be fine for using the 2D version, as games that are using the 2D version probably aren't going to be animating the rolls anyway. In fact, I see this class being used as more of a results aid where you just want a graphical representation of the game results.