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Monthly Archives: July 2011

Not too much to write home about just yet. I spent an hour or so last night, and tonight, continuing on through the tutorial, playing about with variables and changing textures and stuff just for the hell of it. I’ve now finished the main part of the tutorial and am in the final section when it goes into more detail on the scripts. It’s been a while since I did any scripting and I’ve never used Java before but it seems pretty similar to Lua and the little C++ that I know.

I’m gonna have to start coming up with some ideas for something to make pretty soon! I’ll have to dig out my “crazy game design ideas notebook” and start coming up with some concepts that I could knock up in Unity with my not-too-advanced skill set.

I’ve been reading The 4-Hour Body recently, in which the author, Tim Ferris, outlines four principles of failure proofing behaviour:

1. Make it conscious.
2. Make it a game.
3. Make it competitive.
4. Make it small and temporary.

While he talks about these in terms of getting fit, they apply to achieving pretty much anything. I’ve been meaning to make a game in my own time for ages so now I’ve decided to Make it Conscious by creating this blog. Measurement = motivation. This will let me see how far I’ve come, which will help motivate me to see how far I can go. I can’t wait.

Today I spent a few hours learning the basics of creating a game in the free game engine Unity (http://unity3d.com/) by doing the 2D game tutorial found here: http://unity3d.com/support/resources/tutorials/2d-gameplay-tutorial. I got about halfway through before getting sidetracked by downloading the open source 3D modelling package, Blender (http://www.blender.org/), and trying to import objects from it into Unity, which I managed to do although I found that they appear at the origin as soon as I run the game. I posted on the forums so hopefully someone has faced this issue before and knows a solution. All in all not a bad first day – I’ve learnt a bunch of new stuff already. For Day 2 I want to finish off the tutorial.