Category: Site

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 :)

{fcomment}

Category: Site

Finally, the first week of work has been and gone, give or take a day or two spent on paperwork etc. coming from the relocation. Pretty happy with progress, in fact, all the 3D graphics work I did at university, combined with my programming experience means I can blitz through most of the tutorials. I even managed to get into tweaking some shaders and messing with bump-mapped sprites.

The main objective this week was to get a simple prototype working using both Android and Windows Phone platforms, which has been achieved. I've got to grips with the 2D physics engine, some of the GUI basics (although I understand the current default Unity GUI is pretty poor and going to be replaced in 4.6), materials, textures, and touch input.

The key design principle for this first prototype is that the primary user interaction is a single touch action. In this case a swipe. As you can see in the video below, the direction of the swipe designates the desired direction, and (less obviously as there isn't any visual feedback yet) the length sets the amount of thrust. Placeholder graphics are from MillionthVector.

 

 {youtube}WgY2_MArspc{/youtube}

{fcomment}

Category: Site

It's been over six weeks since we landed in Germany, and it's taking a while to settle in and get everything set up for me to really kick on working....to illustrate, here is the current state of my office.

Current office set up

Not cool. Still, the container is arriving tomorrow so I should have my desk and office chair finally!

 

 

Category: Site

Well I have been in Duesseldorf for 4 weeks now, things are moving a little slowly, we only just got into an apartment and are still sleeping on an airbed! My desktop has arrived but I'm still waiting on the sea shipment for a desk, that and no internet connection yet means development work is on hold. Still, plenty of DIY to be done in the new place, and this city to explore, great place so far!