I teased my new project last month: a lightweight management sim in the vein of Drugwars or Urban Dead. Unfortunately the partnership didn’t pan out (no falling out, we just realized I wanted to work much faster than he did) but I’m going to keep working on this solo. Indeed, a very manageable scope is a large part of why I was interested in this project. This is basically all menus, and that’s all I have time for currently.
The other main motivation for me is that it’s a good excuse for me to finally learn Xamarin. That’s a cross-platform mobile app development framework programmed in C#; I’m very familiar with that language from programming in Unity, so this seems like another good tool to have in my belt.
I spent most of this month working out the practicalities of how to build an app like this in Xamarin. For example, it’s fairly simple to install Json.NET using Nuget, and then I just had to lookup how to load a text file embedded in the app so that I could parse the data in it. Loading and saving binary files was even easier to work out, since that code worked with basically no modification when copied out of my Unity projects.
Meanwhile, from a design perspective I’ll probably make a single-player version of Urban Dead. I’m hoping to actually spin out a series of lightweight management sims with different themes once I have the technological underpinnings in place, but I gotta start with something right?
A game about surviving in a zombie apocalypse is kinda cliche, but Urban Dead is multiplayer-only so a single-player version could be interesting. Plus I’m already thinking the zombies will just be what players see at first, but eventually they’ll face other supernatural creatures in a Cthulhu-esque world.
