Easter break

Category: Site

Published: 21 April 2014

Now back in Düsseldorf after a quick trip to Basel. Some inspiring stuff, including the Odilon Redon exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, and the Kunst Museum where I picked up a great book. I've never been into graphic novels (I usually associated them with Manga or superhero themes), but I flicked through Shaun Tan's 'Ein Neues Land' (originally 'The Arrival') and had to buy it immediately, I can't recommend it enough, beautiful story, illustrations, and a great imagination at work. It's easy to relate to the main themes of the book as an expat! I've felt really inspired and have been sketching out ideas for a new project ever since! Today's rainy Easter Monday is being spent putting some of these into Unity and seeing how they look :)

More shiny!

Category: Site

Published: 16 April 2014

I've had a good few days learning a lot of good stuff about physics2d, trailrenderers etc, adding a fair few little effects to the prototype, as well as cleaning up a lot of the code. Still a few niggles to clean up.

• Add some visual feedback for the power being applied
• Create an object pooling system for the spark TrailRenderer prefabs (you can see them on the collisions, it stutters on the first instantiate currently)
• Fix the damage bar, it works on desktop, but is broken on mobile currently
• Try out some ideas for win conditions (maybe add some pewpew laser destruction)

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Week 2 Plan

Category: Site

Published: 14 April 2014

Short week this week with Easter coming, lots to fit in. Things to tick off this week :

• 1 day GUI work. Add damage meter, move direction pointer to superimpose the ship, re-position, re-align and re-skin to look more appealing. Tempted to look at NGUI, but with the pending Unity 4.6 GUI changes I'll stick with the basic tools for now.
• 1 day Blender crash course. My 3DS Max skills are pretty good and I though I could just dive into Blender...not so! I need to plough through a few tutorials.
• 1 day Blender/GIMP modelling/skinning. Create a 3D model to replace the 2D sprite. UV unwrap and texture in GIMP. Nothing too fancy.
• 1 day refactoring and tweak of direction physics to cut down the oscillation and more smoothly align to specified direction.

Should be plenty along with various admin work that needs to be done. I also want to clean up the format and structure for the tutorials section. I will be re-building that all once this first game is complete with some useful stuff! One thing I have found slightly annoying with Unity tutorials is that most of them assume you can't code so the majority is explaining C#/OO basics which I don't need, maybe there's a niche for 'Unity for Programmers' type articles....we shall see :)

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