Developer DIary: The Doors Are Frozen Shut

So last week I promised you visuals.  So here are some visuals.

Amazing aren’t they? Just stunning!  Ok, I know I’m not much of an artist.  I’m going for super minimalism here, because that means it has to be clean and orderly, as well as being really abstract.  Which means that there’s no need for fancy graphics and all that.  This makes it easier on me, since I’ve carved out a wonderfully complex path for myself in the code.  Fortunately, I am better at coding than I am at art, so I’m willing to take on this challenge I have given myself.

Developer Diary 1: 30 Cycles to Jubilee

And we have 3D. As I mentioned at the end of my last diary entry, 30 Cycles to Jubilee is being made in Unity. This means 3D. I don’t know how I feel about that. On the one hand, I have tried to make a 3D game before (actually two, but let’s not count the first one).  I had wanted to make a game that was basically made out of 3D blocks in which the entire world was destructible. If it sounds from just that like Minecraft, well, that’s basically what it was (but I was thinking of this long before I knew Minecraft existed).  I remember trying to do this in C#, and then failing to grasp how to make it all work. There were triangle fans and vertex lists and all sorts of things that didn’t seem to work out for me, or at least it didn’t make sense from an ease of use standpoint.  So, probably, if I am going to make a 3D game, it will probably be with something like Unity. unity has a nice interface, and it has a variety of scripting options available. It feels powerful enough, though there are some ways in which it feels limited. Some more native primitives might be nice; it was a pain to go into 3D Studio Max to make a disc for collision checking in another project.  The material options also feel very limited, but maybe I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Developer Diary 0: 30 Cycles to Jubilee

So I’ve noticed that a lot of people are doing these things called developer diaries.  They are usually some kind of regular posting about the state of some game that the person is working on.  Since I am going to be making a game this semester, I thought I would give it a try.  So here is diary entry zero. Why zero? Well, I haven’t got much to really show off yet, it’s all just concept so far. I’ve noticed that the developer diaries tend to have some sort of visual spoiler about what’s going on during the development, but I don’t really have that yet. I’ve actually only come up with the idea about a week ago, so there hasn’t been much in the way of development. What i do have, though, is design. And actually, I’ve already given a bit of a hint about the design. But let me get this diary started.