Oh, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I set myself 36 features to build in 3 weeks at the end of last year/start of this one and I have completely failed. Ah well, no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy after all. What’s important is that there has been progress at all… right?
Recently, I’ve been focusing on non-unit level hazards: laser tripwires, spike pits…
I took a week off work to (surprise!) work on my game. Things did not go entirely to plan, as some time during some “routine” fiddling on Sunday or Monday it started crashing. Not crashing as in throwing exceptions from my own code, I mean crashing as in the entire Unity editor bombing out.
I unwound all the potential causes and dug around the internet for answers but basically came up with nothing. It’s something to do with turning colliders on and off and this getting PhysX into a tizzy underneath it all, but I’ve been turning colliders on and off for years (literally years) without a single complaint, let alone an engine-melting complaint.
I found a bug report to Unity which seems to cover it, but that fix won’t be released until June in the next major version. And what if this doesn’t fix my issue, and only affects one with a similar error message? Erk.
So many features, so little time. I said I would build 34 features into my game in three weeks over the festive break; it is now three months later.
But what features! I might have had to unwind a couple of stinkers along the way, but I’m fairly sure the epic combination of fog o’ war and a minimap more than make up for it.
Three years have passed so quickly and yet so slowly, since I threw that first prototype together from random bits of script off the internet. I had destructible crates in that first prototype, but they just never quite felt necessary when I started the real project in earnest… until now.
Yes, I have finally added crates. Loot-containing, on-death-disintegrating crates. It didn’t take three whole years to implement crates, just that long to get around to it. Honest!
Every so often in your life you realise you’ve gone down a massive dead end, and you have to go back to go forwards. This is the point I’ve now reached with my existing level generator; to add the decorative features and traps and sensible enemy placement I need, the current approach just ain’t going to cut it.
So enjoy this video, because it’ll probably be the last visual demonstration for a few weeks.
I can’t actually use a “meat’s back on the menu, boys” pun because I’ve never actually done anything with menus before now. My UI has, up until the last couple of weeks, been limited to the main character control heads-up display, which is operated entirely by keyboard and mouse. So, meat’s not back on the menu, but there is now a menu for it to return to in future.
Too tenuous? Bah, you’re no fun. Either way, gamedev is always on the menu at Chez Robbie, and he’s been hard at work doing things that weren’t specifically mentioned on his feature list to support things that were. (No change there, then.)
I’ve always been bound to the desktop, at least since the GameBoy gave way to the PC and all the delicious level editors it brought. I’ve flirted with cute netbooks once or twice, and while they have their uses as ultra-portable units they are also not very capable. I have never before owned a real laptop…
But with the most productive time of the year upon us, and family obligations looming that will drag me away from my studio and its brooding powerhouse Helios, I felt that it was at last time to equip myself with something that has a foot in both camps. Something capable, but still portable.
Rao Dao Zao 