State of the game - life is a mess and seeking help

The switch to unreal went quite fast and if you followed the stream you know the changes I made to the original concept. Lately I had a few problems with motivation and as a result I did not work on the game as much as I wanted to and I am way behind schedule (by about two month so far).

All that does not mean that I will abandon the game in any way. It simply means that the schedule I set for the streams and the work might not be the same as stated on twitch. The starting time of 10 in the morning is not really working for me most of the time. I was thinking of changing to a 12 to 20 schedule on Tuesdays and Thursday. The rest of the week will hopefully to schedule but I cannot assure that.

As to the game itself, all the old mechanics are in and the first quest is in as well (get beer). There is also the overarching main quest in but only the first two steps are achievable, the rest is not implemented yet. There are a few uncertainties in my original design that I need to figured out. Another thing that is not clear as of now is the visual style of the game on release. Originally I was thinking about a realistic style with me being able to design characters according to some parameters but I cannot easily use the same system in Unreal as I would in Unity.
Now, I was thinking of going the cartoony realism route, like WoW or Darksiders. The problem is that I cannot paint textures myself and I cannot create all environment models myself or it would just take way longer than a trained artist would need for the same work.
Apart from the art side of the game, I still need a lot of story and dialogue content which means a lot of writing and other aspects of the game need to be designed as well.
In a game about beer, there is no beer or any brewing yet, not sure how far I want to go. There is not enough to do in the game so far and I need to change that...

As to my life, it really is a mess, I do not know what is wrong with me but I will get some help soon and hope that I will be able to continue working on the game and get my life in check at the same time. So I hope you will understand this will be my focus first and foremost.

Possible Engine Change

Due to issues with different aspects of my game in Unity, I decided to switch over to Unreal as I got a lot more documentation and tutorials for that engine as for Unity.

One of the issues are for instance the shader I was using for my terrain that made the textures look better and let me have "holes" in the terrain for my caves. The theory is really nice but over long period of time I did not manage to configure the shader to my satisfaction.
In Unreal, I can do the same thing just out of the box and with simple configurations. On one afternoon I was able to import my terrain into Unreal and set it up that it looked similar to the result in vanilla Unity, I also found a tutorial to get the full functionality of the Unity shader in Unreal.
Unfortunately, I also found a bug in Unreal that removes the textures in the piece of terrain on which the terrain hole is located.

Next steps are to import all the environment assets I used in Unity into Unreal and add them to level. After that I will add the mechanics in blueprints to the Unreal project.

Meanwhile, my brother is working on basic character meshes and a pipeline to provide me with different base meshes for each race that I can then use for my character creation both ingame and for npcs.

All this means, that there will be a further delay in my schedule (which is already about a month behind) but hopefully result in a better base game as well. I will work on key features during the next week and if I run into mayor issues along the way, I only "wasted" a week and will go back to Unity where I have to change the scope a bit and then work on more content. In the event that Unreal helps me catch up lost time and speed up development, I will stick with it and continue working on having a prototype ready for testing a week later.

Update after a Long Time and 60 Days of Fantasy Project

Oh, wow, it has been a long time since my last post...

Well, I am still alive and I am still "working" in the games industry. Working is in quotations because I am still unemployed and only work on my own projects. One of these projects has turned into some kind of a full time job (without pay).

Speaking of that project, in December I played a pen and paper role playing session with some friends. The system we used was a home brew system of the DM, a simple system to get you going within minutes. The world was also his design and quite hilarious and we designed our characters accordingly. I played a hill giant paladin who was trying to keep the peace but was killing bandits with his giant stone boulder hammer causing a huge mess. His after-fight "ritual" was drawing runes to cleanse the bloodied ground and smashed remains were sinking into the ground and it was restored to a state looking before the carnage.

After the session, I wanted to turn the main dungeon into a level design project and started working on that in the beginning of February. My friends send me touched up floor plans to work with which helped me putting the layout together faster. It was just supposed to be a visualization of the dungeon and some level design practice for me but it turned to something more. 

In the middle to end of February, I picked up streaming again and besides playing games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, The Division (Open Beta), Stardew Valley and SkySaga, I did some streams with game development. I did pick a schedule for me that works comfortably and stream game dev for about 8 hours every day of the week, taking weekends off to get a bit of distance and not burn out. 

Last Thursday I took some time and looked up my times for the streams and noticed that I had been working on the so called Fantasy Project for about 60 days (53 days streamed and a few days more on offline work). 

From my initial small level design practice, the project grew to a big game project with a big world map (about 4 x 4 km) with a village, a few farms and the exterior of the brewery and more to explore. I plan on filling the map with interesting stuff to explore and interesting stories to discover. So far I have the base mechanics in which are simple first person adventure game mechanics. You use the mouse to click on highlighted objects in the world, right click gives you info and left click does interactions with the objects. At the moment the interactions are just text feedback but there will be sounds, particle effects and custom events for specific objects.

As I am working on the project alone I have to do not only level design and programming but also a bit of content creation in 3D programs. As my licence for 3D Studio Max ran out a long time ago I needed a new program to work with, so I picked up Blender and had to learn the strange interface and apply my previous knowledge in modelling to it. The first few models I created were simple cave entrances for my terrain but I had to move on from that to clothing creation for a character customization system in Unity (UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar). I kinda enjoyed that completely new aspect of model creation as my previous knowledge was in static level objects like walls or other simple level elements.

So as a conclusion, I am working on an indie game on my own at the moment live on Twitch. Come watch me on Twitch.tv/apolyon6k as I want to do all the development live and the plan is to get the game out by February next year (no concrete planning done yet). Pictures and more info on the game later ;)

Updates after a pause that was far too long

It has been too long without any update, my life is still kinda the same. I am working on my projects and some of them proceed others fall victim to unfortunate time management. 

As for projects, my game projects have changed a bit. 

I will continue working on Zombie Sleepover at later date, a friend of mine (another game designer from the Games Academy who helped me with a three month internship at a local game company) is going over the design and is making a proper design document for a fun first person shooter.

Dork Tales is on hiatus at the moment and I might get back to it as soon as I get someone to help me out with assets like 3D models and audio files (music and voice overs). The ideas I have for the game I cannot realise as of now, meaning without money to pay for the help I need.

I started a new project to work with Unreal Engine 4. It is an idea I was toying with for some time and it is based upon Phaeton, the scifi world some friends and I have been working on for some time. It is based on Blueprints at the moment but I will change that for later iterations and convert them to C++, at least the most crucial systems.

Oh, I mentioned an internship earlier. I was having no luck getting a job in the industry with traditional methods but got an offer for an internship after posting in an private user group. I tweaked my CV and over those connections I got an internship at a local game company working with Unity. The project is off yet unannounced, so I am not able to talk about it. Working in a real company sure was a learning experience that changed my expectations a bit. I learned the importance of good structure in code and project alike and that communication should never be neglected.

On other fronts, I picked up writing again and might even start up another blog or something similar just for that. That will include the translations of almost all my stories into English as they are almost all in German. I also came up with a new idea for a story that I might publish along with the other older stuff.

I haven't really played any games for some time now apart from Creativerse but as much as I like the game, it is just a time waster, something you can play on the side while watching tv series or movies. Speaking of games, Fallout Shelter released on Android and I wasted some time and money in it so far. I would not really call it a game in the classic sense, it is just a clicker that tries to push some buttons like caring for your dwellers and leveling up as many of them to get better gear from the wasteland to have better chances of survival. It is a recurring cycle repeating over and over again without any real involvement and chance of influencing it.

Memories and other Stuff

Was talking to a friend and we reminisced about stuff we each did when we were younger. I was reminded that I had a lot of different story starts and one or two short stories that I have to translate at some point.

When I was in my late teens, I wrote a lot. Stories, Ideas and world descriptions for pen and paper roleplaying are stuffed in a folder on one of my shelves and catch dust. All of those are written in German and I want to translate some or all of it. There are two or three stories with quite a few pages (20 to 40) and one or two short stories that could be translated and published as is. One of the bigger stories I recently started to translate and already have five chapters finished. It is in a rough state and has no formatting or proofreading done. Parts of it might still be in German on a few pages and in the appendix. Here is a link to it on my google drive.

The translation is as slow as all my other projects even though I found a nice article about finishing writing novels with only a few words per day (how to push past the bullshit and write that goddamn novel a very simple no fuckery writing plan to get shit done). I just need to get my shit together and plan out my day better.

On the job front, I got a chance for a nice C# programming gig here in my city (yay, no moving) but it involves a test that will be send out next week and there are other candidates. I do not know my chances there as I am a bit rusty due to my long time being unemployed and only having done a bit of coding during that time. I have done different projects in Unity ranging from simple movement scripts up to plugins for the editor (parts of my adventure toolkit that I worked on), so I think that I at least know a bit about writing code for Unity. I will not make more predictions in that regard as I do not know what the test will be and I also do not know enough about the company to anticipate the scope of their projects apart from focusing on mobile games made with Unity.

As for what I do with my time, well the usual, gaming and watching american tv shows. The games I played recently were Creativerse and a game called "Timber and Stone" which is a bit like Dwarf Fortress mixed with Minecraft. Randomly generated blocky terrain and buildings as well as characters build out of small cubes. In a recent update they added slopes to the terrain and more detailed textures, it looked better for it.

Creativerse is switching to Unity 5 atm and they are reworking the movement system, so it is a bit different now but if that is good or bad, I cannot say yet.

I have not worked on Dork Tales as much as I wanted and Zombie Sleepover is officially on hiatus by now and could maybe call it canceled as well ;P

Indie Development: Self Made vs. Store Bought vs. Originality + a few updates on projects

In Zombie Sleepover, we recently hit a major road block, all our assets are store bought and we do not have an artist to change the textures or models but as the bought assets are nice and popular, a lot of developers are using them. It is fine for small things but if the sample levels from the content creators are used in games unaltered, they go a bit too far.

There is a huge package for medieval caves, dungeons and castles on the asset store and we found at least three games on steam and on other platforms with the same assets, even with whole level segments copied from the samples provided. I do not own the games, so I do not know if the content creators are credited enough and I do not know what the right way to credit store bought assets is frankly, shall I list all the packages I bought or not? Do I do that only if I do no alterations on the assets?

Store bought assets are fine for prototyping and if you are able to change them to make them fit your game better but using them unaltered in the end project seems kinda cheap but we were thinking of doing the same thing just because we do not have the artistic skills required to make out own 3d art or the textures like in those packages. As that stands, do we have a problem and need to hire an artist or is it ok to use those assets and make the game we want with generic assets but with our game play and level ideas? Will our game be less original as a result? Is it possible for a programmer and a sound designer to make a game on their own without going the "artistic minimalist route" or do crappy pixel art (not that all pixel art is bad, there are some really good pixel artists out there)?

Due to negative feedback on Zombie Sleepover and the amount of games with the same assets, we are changing the concept for the game to be something different (more on that later, as soon as we are done with the redesign). That will result in a change in our projected timeline, meaning the game has to redesigned a lot and we do not know how long that will take.

In the meantime, I am working on a few things in Dork Tales and hopefully get back to streaming on a more regular basis and keep it up this time (hopefully)

Still Alive and Kicking (or Shooting Zombies!)

Well, it has been a while (three month or so) but I have been trying to get my life back on track and Dork Tales is still on hiatus and the procedural terrain minecraft thingy is as well. Since Windborne basically stopped production I moved on to another game for my free time and it is another sandbox building game (who would have guessed, lol, like those too much) called Creativerse. Creativerse is a bit more like minecraft visually but not mechanically and I have about 400 hours sunk there since the end of August...

All that doesn't sound very productive and more like wasting time but it is not really because through the community of those two games I met someone who also wants to start out in game design and he has skills that I do not have and that are needed for indie development like an art and marketing background. We were playing a lot of coop and streamed that on his channel and we joked about starting our own company to make games. One day, he contacted me and introduced me to an old colleague of his who was willing to fund our first steps...

As we all played Skyrim and sandbox games, we want to make our our own mix of the two at some point but to start out with that would be a guaranteed failure! We have to start simpler and a lot smaller, so Loki, my coop buddy, came up with the idea to make a zombie fps. I am not a big fan of zombies in any kind of media but he convinced me and we started out working on a few level concepts and I started to write a simple shooter controller in Unity. With some assets bought from the store, we will be able to get a few levels set up in a short time and shoot some zombies. (Really like the asset store for Unity!)

Those are the little buggers!

They are cartoony and cute but can be quite deadly in masses as well:

The game is about shooting them and collecting coins to upgrade your weapons to shoot more of them... more or less ;P

The first part is nearly finished for testing, have to do the menu works next and do the weapon upgrades later. The plan is to have a working prototype (or vertical slice) up and running to test out between us and a few selected testers and with the feedback improve the game and then go on to Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight to get more eyes on it and a bit more funding to compensate us for the work done so far and finance the rest of development.

Development shot: Unity 4.6 with new UI system and a glimpse into one of the levels. 

How many level we want to have is not 100% clear yet but we are confident to produce quality levels in a short time frame to add a variety of different setups without going the procedural generated route .This approach gives us more control over the look and feels of every aspect of every level to include Easter eggs and different ways to finish a levels.

The types of levels we have planned at the moment are mazes, wave setups and boss arenas. There will be no open world and no crafting apart from upgrading weapons via coins. Coins can only be obtained in-game by killing zombies or collecting them in rooms, no option to buy them for real money in a store or stuff like that.

The game will be single player for Windows PC with the option to port it over to Mac and Linux. Multiplayer is not planned but could be an expansion later on with maps specifically designed for that. We aim for Steam as a platfom to get a lot of people to be able to see the game but will also publish it elsewhere like Desura or DRM free on Humble or GOG (long term goals, lol)

Dork Tales - Redesign in Progress

After a long hiatus, I started to redesign the existing levels of Dork Tales and get a better idea of the project's scope. Most levels have to be redone because the scale in the prototype was off. The reason for the scale differences were models from different sources and not enough focus on consistency.

The flow of the levels is not changed but there are a few more sketches for their layout that I brought over from my tablet and paper sources.

I did some blockouts for the start room and now I have to do some wall modelling and build up a few modular pieces that I can use in different parts of the world. The main look is sandstone that was smoothed out and has inlays and door frames carved into it. There should be no seams between wall pieces that have to be covered up by columns. All wall pieces are one sided so the the camera has no problem looking through them. For columns and other large objects that could block the player's view of his character, I might have to write a shader that makes them temporarily transparent.

The cat fish is being resized, rigged and optimized by my little brother who did some work modding Skyrim. He will also build me a base mesh for humanoid characters that can be used for character generation ingame and for most npcs though a plugin for Unity.

The UI is still based off Unity's old scripted GUI system and will be updated as soon as the new visual system is released.

Plans are that I will try to finish the redesign of the first two levels around next weekend (around the 8th) and after that move on to the next levels that are designed yet (as shown above).

Student Project V: Adventure Toolkit - Sample Game "finished"

The sample game for my adventure toolkit is finished to the point that was set with my tutor. There are two levels and some "loading scenes" around them. It is a classic point and click adventure game with five actions (walk, talk, pick up, use and look at), seven items that can be picked up and three more items that can be gained by combining items. It is called "Dork Tales".

I ended up modeling three different characters, the cat fish mentioned earlier, a frog in a fisherman's coat and hat as well as the main character, a normal human that looks a bit too much like me...

Frog with umbrella (front)

Frog with umbrella (side)

Frog with umbrella (perspective)

Cat Fish with textures (front)

Cat Fish with textures (perspective)

Cat Fish with Textures (side)

Main Char (front)

Main Char (perspective)

Main Char (side)

All models are still somewhat low poly and have simple textures but that is sufficient for the sample game.

Here are some ingame screen shots:

finished level in Editor (without any ui and old shader for the crystals)

That is the latest version (ingame screen shot with ui)

The resolution is 16 to 9 because the camera pans in the first level and in widescreen it was easier to navigate.

The game is not finished at all, it is just the introduction to a bigger game I will try to continue in my free time but inside the scope of the student project it is finished and will be graded as part of the whole project. The play time so far is about five to ten minutes depending on reading speed and puzzle solving skills. The puzzles are quite simple item combinations with some word play involved like binding two ribbons to a bow (tie) and combining that with an arrow sign results in bow and arrow...

I had more word play planned for the game but realized that most of it would involve an extended understanding of the english language which was not present with most of my testers, so I will add more later on and try to integrate other kinds of puzzle elements to balance the word play. The main character is a pen-and-paper role playing gamer but that is something that is not that dominant by now. I will also have to change that because it is his story and apart from a dice bag and some comment on interacting with it and the environment there is no mention of rpg at all, no cliches or no innuendo at all...

Student Project V: Adventure Toolkit - Progress and more

I made some progress with my Adventure Toolkit Unity3D add-on (ATK). The dialogue editor is feature complete and working as intended. I changed the look a bit and tried to integrate it more into Unity, I also changed the drawing code for the connection lines so that it displays the ids of parent and child nodes and omits lines that are going from the output of a node to the input of another node that is located left of the starting node. That change improved the visibility a lot and the added ids make the connections more readable.Another added feature is the comment on every dialogue line that can be used to describe emotions and other nodes needed for voice acting or other important notes for every single line.

more visibility by omitting some connection lines and better information on the links by added parents and child ids

The item editor is the next part of ATK that will be worked on and I intent to finish a first version by the end of the week. The item editor will include adding new items and combining items to other items. Unlike the dialogue lines, every item will be saved as a single file that can be opened in the editor and dragged into the scene for placement. There will be two different kinds of items, one that only exists as part of the UI and another that can be placed as mentioned. The second kind will get a mesh component and additional code for handling the pick-up process. There will be a base class that represents all the data needed for the item including an icon for visualisation. Compound items do not need a scene representation so the first kind will only be the base class.

The ingame UI will include a small inventory grid at the lower right of the screen where about ten items can be shown. If there are more items in the inventory, a scrollbar will be visible to scroll up and down through the whole inventory. On the left part of the lower screen there will be action icons for the available interaction types the game will have. There will be the classics like "walk", "talk", "pick up", "give", "look at / examine" and "use". If I include "push" and "pull" depends on the artists I get for my sample game (animations and characters). I will focus on Unity GUI but maybe add NGUI later on. My intention is that the user can use his own UI solution for conversations, inventory and ingame UI but there will be examples and a manual on how to integrate the parts into the mentioned UI solutions and ideas on integration into others.

On other news, the praxis test is finished and handed in. Since the last three weeks were consumed by it, progress on ATK is a bit slow and I am a bit behind my schedule, so I have to do some additional work on the weekend to make up for the lost time. But now, I have a prototype for a level editor that I can use as a basis for a "shippable" CookieX editor.

Student Project V: Adventure Tool Kit - Introduction, progress and more

It is the fifth semester and my last at the Games Academy and this time around I have not found enough other students to work on my idea (a point & click adventure in Unity) and the other projects were not what I wanted to do in my last semester. Apart from group projects we can also do solo projects in which we have a tutor who will supervise the challenge we set for ourselves.

So I really wanted to develop my own point & click adventure and now I am doing that alone. Unfortunately, without much outside help I am not capable to get my ideas in a game, so I decided to build a tool kit with which I might be able to make my ideas reality later on. The first part of the Adventure Tool Kit (ATK) is a dialogue editor with nodes for every line in the conversation.

My work started about three weeks ago and my first working prototype is ready:

Complex dialogue with multiple "hubs", I used the first dialogue of "Magic of Innocence" as an example node network.

Even though it might look ready yet, there are a lot of kinks I have to iron out before calling it "finished". As you can see in the screen shot complex networks with hubs can get kind of confusing to follow so far. There are some features missing that might be important but for that I have to meet with my tutor and show him the process and get his feedback.

The next part will be an item editor and after that I will implement a control system for mouse and touch interaction. The end goal will be a small game prototype were I used my tool kit for content creation.

If the tool kit works as I want it to I might even considering selling it on the Unity Asset Store. If I will provide it as a whole package or a set of components, is not clear yet.

Some artists I worked with have said that they might provide me with some art assets that I can use for my prototype, so it might not end up as crappy as I thought ;P

Cookie X - Some Progress and Plans for the Future

I started Cookie X as a side project to learn a bit more programming in C#. Unfortunately there was little time or motivation to do much while I worked on Toy Flyer. Especially in the end phase of that project I was happy to not code on the weekend and so Cookie X sank into some kind of dormant state. 

I worked a bit on collision and simple physics but the result so far is not that great. There is the problem that Cookie either flies or his jump is not even noticeable and some collisions are detected irregularly. So far I have only worked with simple sphere and box collisions but those will not work with the platform graphics that "Revenge of the Cookie" used. Implementing my own physics calculations is harder as initially expected and too much for me at the moment. If I want to finish Cookie X, I would have to use some kind of physics engine to help me out. The first project was started in Unity because of that but some disagreements let us to abandon Unity and switch to Torque2D. In hindsight it might have been better to stick with one engine and finish it there as we encountered the same problems as before.

Using a 3D engine for a 2D game might be a bit overhead but I have worked with Unity on two successful projects by now so I might switch from XNA to Unity. Another bonus in Unity is the integrated editor which frees up my time considerably because I don't have to write my own. In one of my classes at the Games Academy we will work on an editor for 2D games in Unity that will be separated from Unity. When it is finished I will integrate mine with Cookie X and could publish them together.

The progress is not lost because I can port my classes to Unity and continue from there. When finished I could even publish the game but that will only happen if I find enough time to recreate the original game and maybe finish it according to the design documents we made for the student project. When the mechanics are working and the editor is integrated I will give it to a friend who was level and game designer for the first game and he can build some levels. Maybe we will even recruit some 2D artist to create additional graphics for platforms or enemies...

Student Project IV - Post Mortem

The fourth student project at the Games Academy is at an end.

It was quite a challenging project, unfortunately not because of high technical difficulty but because of endurance and staying focussed. We struggled to find a vision we all could live with and could work on, which resulted in a lot of unnecessary work and motivational problem for most team members. We found our vision about three quarters in the given time and had all to work overtime to finish it. I initially wanted to work on Cookie X on the weekends but there was not time for it and I even had to cancel on parties and seeing friends.

The problem was that a helicopter is not really suitable as a vehicle in a racing game, so the game designer played around with different mechanics until he found the "taxi mode", where the player has to transport items from one place in the room to another. Ideas like a rescue helicopter or a real taxi helicopter were tested but not fun enough for us. We wanted something different. And that we found.

Why not build a city out of building blocks via helicopter. That idea was kind of strange at first but combined with a mechanic to pick up blocks and a kind of 3d blueprint of the building to build, it worked. The player controls the helicopter, flies around the room, can pick up blocks of different shape and size that are distributed all over the room, fly with them to a designated building place and drop the block at the right spot in the blueprint.

To accomplish that we build the mechanics and made play tests but the pick up process and the placing inside the blue print was quite difficult. With a target group of casual mobile gamers in mind, the controls were far too difficult. After a long period of time (one programmer being absent helping his wife with their new born kid), we managed to fix even that and in the end we had a nice little casual on the android platform.

Like I mentioned in the previous post, I worked on the UI, menu and asset integration. Unity has some problems with 3rd party revision tools like SVN, so we had some difficulties there but after some mistakes we managed to overcome that obstacle as well. Another curiosity is that 3d models imported into Unity are scaled down to 0.01 of their original size by default. There is a scale option but while importing a bunch of models it was overlooked, which had unwanted results and I was the only one charged with integrating all assets after that. For a mobile project we needed to limit the draw calls as much as possible but if there are two instances of the same model (which use the same material) inside a scene but they are scaled in Unity they will produce two separate draw calls. So, all models had to be scaled outside of Unity and the material had to be versatile enough to be used on as many models as possible. Unity is able to combine meshes that use the same material and that are switched to static (if it is not moved) reducing the draw calls and thereby boosting the performance on mobile devices.

Due to the short time frame at the end of the project we could not implement all the needed tweaks to make the game work with older or less powerful devices than my tablet but we will do so during the next few weeks.

Student Project IV - Introduction

The fourth semester started about a month ago and my next student project is nearing its first prototype.

The idea is to have one of these remote controlled toy helicopters and be able to fly around in a kids room. Our target platform is Android, mostly tablets but maybe we might get it polished enough to get it to work on phones as well.

There is a game in the Google Play Store that features a toy helicopter but it is more like a simulation. Our goal is to have a game were the player is able to fly through predetermined routes inside our level, collect points or other pickups and will have a control scheme that is easy enough to handle by 12 year olds (or clumsy people like myself ;P ).

We are using Unity as our game engine and my tasks will be UI and code implementation for audio and particle effects, like I did for Hadron. Additionally, my assignments will be performance and asset integration as well as tutoring some of my team mates in Unity.

To avoid any confusion, each new semester project consists of a new idea and a new combination of students. Most of the students that worked on Hadron were in their last semester and have left the Games Academy by now, so most of the students I now work with have never worked with Unity before because it is not part of our regular classes. Some had minor experiences with it but not on a full (student) project.

Student Project III - Post Mortem and More

My third game project at the Games Academy is finished and I did do some coding in C# in Unity.

I created a manager file each for audio clips and particles which provided the public variables used inside the Unity editor and the static files or functions to use in other script files throughout the project. Before the project my experience with C# was nearly non existent, I did some work with C++ or Java before, so the syntax was familiar but my feeling about .NET were kind of mixed. But after working for the project and some work in class in connection with XNA, I kind of liked the ease of work with it.

It was my second project in Unity and this time around it was much more fun to work with. Unity is a great tool kit and gives developers much freedom with their projects. A year ago, my skills as a coder or general developer were not good enough to master Unity but having worked with some coders with more experience than me helped me a lot to understand the ease of work and the freedom Unity offers.

In my free time I converted an old program of mine to C#. As a result I also tried out some WPF interfaces and was surprised by the capabilities it offers.

I am looking forward to my future projects and what might also come by...

By the way, look up Hadron on Facebook. It's the project I worked on :)

Student Project III - Introduction

A new semester has begun and with it a new project.

This time it is a 2.5 D platformer in Unity. There is not much to show or tell at the moment, so I just say that I will do some programming for the interface and maybe some particle effects...

There are some tutorial links I wanted to post:

• http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/runner/ (a game prototype somewhat similar to our idea)
• http://www.unity3dstudent.com/category/modules/ (some video tutorials on different aspects of Unity)
• http://pastebin.com/TZM50gGY (a health bar in C#)

2D Engines or 3D Engines for 2D Projects

After spending some time with the development of a 2D game for PC or maybe other platforms I had time to test out some engines that we have access to for free at home or with student licences in school.

For rapid prototyping the Game Maker is the first choice but it has problems with complex mechanics and collusion detection.

Working with Sprites and only 2D objects makes the use of an engine like Unity3D or even the UDK more tedious than helpful because these engines are designed for 3D gameplay and 3D meshes. To tell them otherwise via code is a lot of work and the result is not always desirable. 2.5D on the other hand is more easy to accomplish because the engine already knows how to handle 3D meshes and the "2D gameplay" is possible with some camera tricks.

Using an 2D engine like Torque2D is the better choice for Sprites, 2D objects and 2D gameplay. I am just starting to work with it so I will hold my praises for the moment, maybe it is easy, maybe not...

As for scripting languages most engines today use some kind of c++ related syntax and operators so the switch between different engines is not so difficult, in some cases the code is even transferable between them if not too much engine specific code is being used.

Student Project - Engines a Plenty

And another game engine to learn and to master...

After having some trouble with imprecise collision detection and too much hassle with gravity on jump mechanics we decided to change the game engine for our student project. Previously we used Unity3D but it being an 3D engine and we wanting to make a 2D game resulted in a lot of headache for all of us but mostly me 'cause I had to tame the beast and failed miserably.

In the beginning of the planning phase there was the option to use the Game Maker but we decided against it because it could produce nice prototypes but making good games with it seemed impossible. A better engine had to do the job. Unfortunately, I decided that Unity would be a good alternative and we ran with it as long as we could before realizing that it was too much for us beginners.

One of our teachers mention another engine that we could use that is more powerful than the Game Maker but not a 3D engine that needs too much fixing. He was talking about Torque2D. So we now try our luck with that engine.

My preliminary tests show that the engine is capable of providing the mechanics we want and that it is manageable to change the engine at our current development stage.

All the artwork has to be resized anyway so the conversion in file type that is needed is not that much of a problem. The scripts have to be rewritten with the new engine code in mind but there were just about 50 lines of code combined so no problem there as well.

The Need to Change my Expectations towards Unity

After working with Unity and trying to implement the core features of the game project I am working on, I have to change my previous statement that Unity is comfortable and easy to work with to an extend.

When I first imported the graphics provided by our artist he noticed that they looked rather bland and there were some lines that he was sure were not in the original files. The files were Photoshop CS 2 files and the importer inside Unity had some problems with them. After some tweaking the colours could be corrected but not the lines, maybe there is an image format that we could use that is imported correctly into Unity but as we are not working with the final graphics too much tweaking would be just a waste of time.

Another aspect of Unity that bugs me a lot is the movement of objects by script. Simple movement in one axis posses no threat at all and is easily implemented but creating a jump, that looks good in 2D and is at the same time "physics confirm" meaning it feels right in the given environment, seemed almost impossible at first and without using a set of external scripts. These scripts are included as a standard package with Unity but I wanted to avoid using scripts that provide functionality that is not needed for the project. Unfortunately it was only possible to achieve a suitable jump movement by using said scripts and add my movement scripts on top of them.

As a conclusion I was to hasty to praise Unity as I did but I learned a lot in the process and will test more before jumping on someone's "band wagon" in the future.

UDK vs. Unity and Unity Tutorials

In my previous post I mentioned the fact that I work on a project that uses the Unity Engine and that there are many good tutorials out there, so here are some of them:

• http://www.unity3dstudent.com/
• the YouTube Channel of infiniteammoinc
• the YouTube Channel of the Tornado Twins
• and the tutorials on the Unity main page

 Unity is a toolkit that is powerful yet easy to learn, so everyone who wants to create his own game someday could have a good start with Unity.

Ok, I might sound like an advertisement, but I was surprised myself after having worked with the UDK and failing miserably in getting something other than a 3D Shooter in the end. The UDK is designed for 3D games with high end graphics(textures, shaders etc.). It is possible to create other types of games with it but most mechanics have to be changed or implemented from scratch. Unity on the other hand is more free form with more focus on portability to different gaming platforms than the UDK. The graphics may not be high end but are not outdated either. So designing games with one engine or the other depends on the designer's focus and the style of game play he prefers.