It has been about two weeks or so since my last post, this is mostly due to the fact that I have done very little development. This was mainly due to the long hours I have been doing at my part time job. Luckily I am not working there any more which means I have much more time for development.

It has also been my 21st birthday since my last post which is another reason for the lack of development. For my birthday I got Skyrim on Xbox, and have spent quite some time on this game since then. The game is so rich in content; from the unique songs of the bards to the small side quests spouted from the gossip of an Inn keeper. After only really playing FPS games online recently I forgot how immersive a well created single player campaign can be. 

As great as this game is I still think there is much to  be improved, I've noticed on various occasions that the game has lagged during certain sequences of events such as an NPC turning into a Werewolf. I think this is more than likely a limitation of the Xbox hardware than the game itself.  Graphics aside I have also noticed a number of glitches to do with the gameplay such as auto saves not working, boss health not reducing at all. This goes to show the amount of pressure that publishers put a development team under to release a game. They only manage to sort major problems out and use the phrase "Oh we can patch that" for everything else.

All in all it's a enthralling game and I can't wait to play the DLC that was announced at E3, vampire lords look amazing. 

All this gaming aside I have actually taken some development ideas from the game. Seeing how large and rich environments need to be in modern AAA titles I have decided that none of this could be done without proper instancing, all the bushes and shrubs in the planes of tamriel just couldn't be achieved otherwise.

From this I have decided that creating my own renderer is a must, not only for the experience but also for future projects. How can I make cutting edge tech demo's when I'm limited to a few thousand models in a scene? 

Yesterday I continued my work on the player moveable objects that are to be used for the game "Lit". All the scripting was done in C# including the changing of the colours of the particle systems and the hovering effect that was applied. This is all shown in the video below:

As you can see the use of the player moveable objects can be used to reach higher platforms. This is one of the ways in which the game will use the mechanic to overcome various puzzles/levels in the game. 

The particle system was implemented on the spherical moveable objects first and seemed to work well but with the cube meshes they do not work so well so that will need to be thought about. 

The movement of the objects is currently done by making the moveable object a child of the players transform but this is not ideal and there are various ways in which this could be changed but this also needs some thought about what the final look and feel of the game play will be.

Last night I managed to redo the majority of the project before going to watch the England match. I also added a couple extra features from the tutorial so that I didn't feel so down heartened about being back at square one. The video shows some of the footage of certain things such as Health and Fuel Cell pickups. The start screen is also shown along with various sounds and music that has not been shown in some of the earlier videos. 

This morning I have continued work on the player moveable objects for what was our dare to be digital entry "Lit". It has all been going well and I have been developing this on a completely different version of the project. Can't be making the same mistakes as yesterday now can I?

I will be posting another entry later on or maybe tomorrow with the detailed progress of the player controlled objects.

Peace out.

I have been working all weekend and did not manage to do much development, apart from 30 minutes before work on Friday and I managed to implement the game over screen from the 3rd Person Platformer tutorial which I was pretty chuffed with. 

Today has been my first proper day developing the game and it has not gone well. I started the day creating some player controllable Game Objects like platforms and balls which is one of the main mechanics of the dare to  be digital entry we created. I added some particle systems to show that interaction is possible by the presence of a green glow around the object. I also implemented a currently selected Object which switched to a red glow. I then wanted to implement a scrolling of the objects based on distance from the player and ran into a few problems so I decided to browse the asset store for some sample C# scripts for me to have a look at.

Whilst browsing I accidentally imported some assets into my game and it now doesn't work. For some strange reason none of the animations for the main player work, he travels at peculiar speeds and the physics on other objects does not work. I have deleted all these imported assets and it still doesn't work. After a lot of fiddling and removing certain things I have now realised I need to start with a blank project.

The plus side to this is that I have already created loads of prefabs and scripts that can be thrown straight into this new project file. I will have to be careful not to do too much however or I may end up with the same project that doesn't work.

This has taught me a great lesson that I still need to do versioning even though I'm using a professional Engine like Unity because it appears there isn't actually that much you can undo. I Should be back to the part where I broke the project fairly shortly and will be able to continue development tomorrow.

All in all I would have to write this off as a "Learning Day".

Yesterday I started work on the 3rd person platformer tutorial in Unity. The tutorial was fairly simple and showed mostly the user interface and component side of the Unity engine.  There was also various aspects of code such as the user interface which was done in Java. One thing that amazed me was how quick and easy it was to just create things on the fly like particle systems. The drag and drop components really showed how useful and time saving component based engines are. In the video you can see various effects such as the particle systems and lighting for the jet pack and the teleporter pad.

Now that I have gotten to grips with using Unity I am hoping to start working on a game that me and a few others came up with for our application to dare to be digital. I think starting a project like that will give me real focus and allow e to much further my engine experience and also my ability to create a well polished game.