After going through the FPS Microgame I realised that all these mods required you to pay for them, so I dropped that and searched for something else. It wasn't long till I stumbled across this 2D RPG game called Rubys Adventure.

I've been going through the tutorial on stream, here is the first of a few streams following the tutorial.

As I've started to take up streaming and learn the Unity Engine I decided I would start with one of the in-editor tutorials. They have these "microgames" that are available, I've picked the First Person Shooter one.

Anyway here is a video of me working through it:

Thanks for watching, I'm really excited to see where this goes.

​Cheers :)

So during lockdown I've been looking for something productive to do that will kil the time. I've been gaming a lot and have decided to start doing some Twitch streaming. Whilst doing this I thought what a great opportunity to dive into streaming for my software development. So I decided I would pick Unity back up and give that another whirl.

There has been a pretty steep learning curve with all this, I've had to learn how to setup all the streaming applications and get my system setup, ensuring that my audio is synced properly. I also wasn't aware of how strict the rules are with playing copyrighted music, although it makes total sense really.

Anyway this is just to be a short post, you can find links:
Twitch
YouTube

​I hope to see you on one of my channels,
​Cheers!

Wow it's been a while since I did a blog post. I've really let it slide for quite a while recently and basically it's because I've not been doing any real dev work outside of work. This is a bit annoying but there are a few reasons for this. 

So last post I was talking about the game I was wanting to develop with a couple of other people. I have pretty much given up on this, there were some differences in how the project should be progressed and motivation for it dropped. I have never really had any trouble keeping motivation high for my own projects so that was an indicator for me that it wasn't working. 

I am going to start back up on my JBEngine project which is great as that is really where my interests lie. I may not have as polished a game as I could using a commercial engine but I think a lot of the satisfaction will come from the fact that I've built it all myself. 

That brings me to something else I have been thinking about. I'm going to really reign in the scope of my JBEngine project and try and create a 3D version of a classic arcade game. This will allow me to create a finished game hopefully and then I can polish and have a product that I can actually say I've completed. 

I've just got myself a new job as a Software Developer at the IBM Manchester Lab. I'm pretty damn excited about it and will hopefully be a massive career boost for me. The only thing I'm really nervous about is that they use Linux which I have never used before. This past week I have been getting myself up and running getting used to using Linux for development in preparation for starting on Monday. 

I will be fairly sad to leave Inspired Gaming as it was a really fun job and I got along well with everyone there. I've learnt a lot from the people there, and had much more experience working closely with a tester and project manager than I did at Arden. 

My new job will hopefully bring a lot more experience with it being such a different area to what I'm currently used to. 

I hope to back up and running with regular dev updates soon.

Cheers :) 

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.