So…as the year’s gotten busier, my good start in january―with 4 consecutive weekly-posts to this blog―has devolved into one-post-a-month or less… and i’m again burning the midnight candle as little clawed crustaceans scuttle about in some sandy corner of my mind.  Shall this be another monologue about sleep deprivation & contrived self-reflection, or do i actually have something meaningful to say this time around?

Only time can tell…and for the record, it is now  時間5:37a―perhaps a hour or so before dawn, and it seems that my thoughts about a late night snack will more likely be realized as a very early breakfast.

Now that some time has passed (nearly 2 weeks since i’d first started this entry back in the latter 1/3 of feb.) and i’ve gotten some decent bit of sleep with nary a dream about starfish, perhaps we can get on with a blog-post that is more about art&design and game-dev, and less about me rambling about some whatever drek about crabs…or perhaps not, as this is mostly about crabs.

A quick Google-search has proved why the phrase “a bad case of crabs” sounded so unsavory to me, despite my having forgotten just what type of health-affliction “crabs” are…but it did seem STD-related.  Two words: crab louse.  Ewww~  Also know as pubic louse (Pthirus pubis)―make that a double-Ewww  o_O ―these minuscule insects are know for inhabiting regions where the sun don’t shine…and i don’t mean Hades, either.  (For those with the stomach/curiosity for just what the nasty lil’ sucker look like, click to see a magnified image from wikipedia here~). 

But, i digress; my main point is not to talk about pest infestations nor the short & curlies, but rather about how some helpful bit of code in C# will save my w-i-p game from a future buried in crabs.  Ahem, the decapod crustacean variety…or a least a stylized version of them (note that my featured crab lacks the proper number of appendages, that being 10 appendages total: a pair of chelae pincers and 8 other legs for locomotion).  But before we deal with the infestation, i’d like to talk a bit about the design-process of this lil’ critter which i like to call “crabbius”.

Around mid-february, i had made a mock-up for a mobile puzzle game based on a “monsters” theme, for which i’d drawn―using primarily adobe Illustrator―a few character puzzle-piece tiles.  i’d designed the “monsters” with elements/themes energy, organic, bronze, and ice  (from left to right).

Soon after, as i was creating art-assets for a w-i-p starFish Clam-muncher  game that i’m currently building in Unity, the idea arose that i could modify my bronze-element character into a new crab-creature, an enemy of sorts to scuttle about the top-down 2D, sandy playfield of my game.  So after frankensteining the chelae from an older crab design, moving some spikes/appendages around, and adjusting some colors―Ta-da:  the blue Crabbius that adorns this blog-post~!

Now as for the aforementioned crab infestation, suffice it to say for now that a handy bit of properly-implemented Destroy(gameObject)  script (thanx to billy’s patient guidance :) ) will avert said potential infestation of infinitely-spawning crabs and prevent them from crawling indefinitely into the desolate, unseen, and untamed regions of my game.

And if that doesn’t work, one can just bust out the boiling pots and some garlic butter~       >[:p