Hey guys. We at Ticca are making a party game for iOS and Android called story scribe.

The jist of it is to make a collaborative story with the first player making up a story name and first chapter, the second drawing a picture by the chapter, the third writing a chapter based on the picture and so forth.

We're at a point in development where we'd really like feedback on how we're doing and whether we're going in the right direction so we decided to post it in itch.io https://ticca.itch.io/storyscribe

It's already downloadable on google play store in early access and using testflight.

What do you think about it? What parts work and what don't? Do you have ideas how to make it better?

- Ticca dev team
 

P.S. Here are some screenshots

We're also starting to make regular updates on the story scribe pages devlog if you want to keep up-to-date on what we're doing. Hopefully we'll also be able to talk about our design process for the multiplayer functionality for example.

- Pullis, ticca programmer

Hi

Lately we've been working on some usablity fixes for story scribe.

These include snapping images for the full screen mode (dragging the image left or right results in the current image to snap to the center of the screen) in the show and tell part of the game. These are shown in the first video embedded below.

We've also added the ability to reorder the players inserted for the game as visualized in the second video.

We're working on the game in Unity engine which has been notoriously wonky with UI stuff so doing for example the reorderable drag and drop list seemed a bit annoying at first but luckily we found an excellent UI extension package for Unity. Here's the link to the package.

https://bitbucket.org/UnityUIExtensions/unity-ui-extensions/src/master/

The package has lots of really useful UI components and it is free to use for commercial projects so it was a perfect fit for us. You should definitely give the package a look if you need anything a bit more complicated in your Unity UI.

That's all from me at this point

 - Pullis, ticca programmer

Hi all. Hope you're doing well.

Story scribe is progressing smoothly. Today I spent most of the day working on an interesting bug which I decided to share some thoughts on.

In our game we show an animation of a book landing on a table. The animation itself is actually a Webm with a VP8 codec and a transparent background. That's a good way to do transparent video according to the unity docs a least.

We ran into the interesting problem with that particular video though... On Android devices when we had the "keep alpha" setting on on the webm for transparency the video lagged horribly. It usually managed to show only a frame or two of the almost 4 sec long video.

I didn't manage to find a reason as to why the video lagged so much with transparency and all the different settings I tried and smaller fixes did nothing. Without the transparency the video played in great quality and without lagging at all.

That's when it hit me. I thought I'd approach the issue from a completely different angle and I did. I used the same video but instead of having a transparent background the background was completely black. I then nabbed a shader online (link below to source) for a green screen style chroma keyed transparency. With that the video worked like a charm and with some minor adjustments it looks excellent now!

So now we have a VideoPlayer -component with a render texture target and the render texture target has a material with the chroma key shader. Simple setup but works really well for our fullscreen video on top of UI.

Hopefully this shader and the mentioned VideoPlayer setup can be of use to you

https://unexpectedend.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/unity3d-chroma-key-shader/

With regards,

 - Pullis, Ticca programmer