I am trying the lean startup thing and I have been launching what I have nearly as fast as possible. That meant my first attempt at a page was ugly. My second attempt is a bit of an improvement but I still have a long way to go before I am happy. Trying out the 960 grid system and generating the artwork/template in Inkscape. After this it is back to more game updates!
Inkscape art and a hint at what is next
My next game/tutorial is well underway and I just got to make a little bit of art. These are the first two weeks I have dedicated to art in over 10 years. It has been a great reminder of how rewarding art can be. Any other programmers out there that are giving art a try?
Any artists out there with advice/critique? I’m hoping my starting talent level is ever so slightly above the dreaded “programmer art”!
Makeroids – Asteroids Tutorial in Unity3D
Makeroids Screenshot
A complete tutorial for creating an asteroids clone using Unity.
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Posted in Tutorials
Tagged Asteroids, Audacity, Blender, How to make a game, igamemaker, Inkscape, Unity3D
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Website Overhaul
Over the next couple of days I will be doing a complete overhaul of this site and during that process some of the pages may be half complete. The good news is that new content will be here very soon.
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2010 vs. 2011 at IGAMEMAKER.COM
2010
The main two IGAMEMAKER.COM achievements from last year were:
My main goal last year was to do one small project and finish with with a fairly high level of polish. I’ve had roughly 850 people watch the making of video and roughly the same number play the game so I think this was a success.
2011
On January 1st I became a registered iOS developer. An hour after registering I launched my current, incomplete and top secret, game onto my iPod. This year I am hoping to do the following:
- Create and launch a game on the app store
- Create more projects/video tutorials
- Add in the ability to donate or purchase larger tutorial source files (allowing you to download the video if desired)
If you have an interest in further tutorials please let me know your suggestions/preferences. Here is my list as it stands today:
- Tic Tac Toe – Cocos2D, Cocos2D-x, UDK (why now?)
- Google App Engine – Hosting Unity player with Google App Engine
- Top seller break downs – Flight Control, Angry Birds, etc.
- My game as it develops…
- Anything else that comes to mind?
Last year was more than a little hectic and there wasn’t much time for projects or blogging. I cut out the “fluff” posts and focused on getting meatier results. I’m going to do that again this year and focus on “doing” and then blogging when I have something interesting rather than something forced. I am planning on having more time to dedicate to development this year and I’m hoping to share some of it soon.
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Tic Tac Toe – Finished
I have finally completed a small game project: Tic Tac Toe!
Because of the awesomeness that is Unity it is available on the web, however it is currently hosted on my own tiny server so this might be a bit slow and access to it might be intermittent.
Over the last few weeks I stopped posting game updates and focused on getting a VERY small game project done. The result was this Tic Tac Toe implementation. I decided to finish the simplest thing possible and I am happy with that choice. I also decided to accept help from a great artist friend of mine in order to finish. Now that it is basically done I thought I would chat through a bit of how it was made for those interested.
Attempt #1
I was really excited to do an iPhone project but told myself I couldn’t spend money on it until I could finish a project using just the simulator. In roughly 8-12 hours I wrote a version of Tic Tac Toe that looked roughly like the Unity one that I completed later. Only the main board was working and only 2 player (no A.I.). At this point in the project another artist friend of mine bugged me to try out Unity. In 4 hours I caught up to where I was and it looked like it would go even faster in Unity AND it would give me the ability to have an OS X, Windows, Web and iPhone version! So I happily switched.
Tic Tac Toe in Unity
Opening up Unity was a bit awkward for me at first being someone more familiar with Visual Studio than with asset creation tools like Maya. About five minutes later I was completely converted. I love that Unity acts as a sort of “asset hub” where you collect all of your game data and double clicking any asset opens its own application to edit the file. The documentation and tutorials were great, but rather than reading a bunch of how to documents (I still haven’t), I just opened up a JavaScript file and started writing my game in the OnGui() function. My entire game was contained in one JavaScript file and I did not run into that many troubles creating the game.
Phase 1 – Play board and scoring (4-8 hours)
The first thing I did was create a grid of 9 buttons and a storage array in to say what buttons were set. You can pass a GUI.Button an image so based on what space was taken I would select one of the button images. After this worked, I wrote some code to see if an entire row, column or diagonal was filled and then I would score points for that row. Next I added in detection for a draw. Finally I wrote some code to display the score and had a basic Tic Tac Toe game going with myself.
Phase 2 – Functionality and A.I. (4-8 hours)
With the basic game running I was moving into new territory for this code (I had already done the above in xcode). I started with simple A.I. Easy – Pick a random open space. Medium – Win if you can, block other player from winning, random. Hard – Same as medium. Then I went through and enabled a turn indicator (lights up X or O for whose turn it is), reset board button, reset score button and sliders for 1 player/2 players and easy/medium/hard difficulty.
Phase 3 – “Polish” and audio (4 – 8 hours)
My final phase of work on the demo was finishing the audio and making all of the graphics look great (alignment, correct textures, etc.). To customize sliders I had to use the GUISkin class and I noticed that all of the button, box, label and slider classes all have padding and borders on them. This is what was causing my misalignment. After removing those all I needed to do was override the slider and slider thumb textures and my application looked great! Audio was probably the most fun and surprising part of making the game for me. I used the terminal “say” command to output the generated speech to an audio file. Adding this and a button press file from this site and my audio was complete.
I don’t even think I used Unity in the way it was intended and I still found it very easy to use!
Thoughts on building Tic Tac Toe
I’m very happy that I picked such a small project and actually finished it. The project took a total of 12-24 coding hours and roughly 4-5 art hours. Had you asked me before starting how long Tic Tac Toe would take and I probably would have said 4-8 hours. Without polish that was true, but to actually “finish” the game it took three times as long. The range is because I didn’t journal my time working on the game. If I had to pick a number I would say the project took 24 hours or three full-time working days including the time to learn Unity. This information will help me plan my future projects to make sure that they are accomplish-able. I will probably post more intermediate progress steps on future projects.
If people are interested in the source code or a tutorial on this please let me know in the comments and I will write-up a follow-up post, otherwise I will be happily working on the next game.
