Every little thing in making a game is a hurdle, or at least a dozen google searches then a hurdle
Today wrote my own InputManager for multi touch, made it way smarter than I should have, it will look for a special component on the object you touch ( which it find by doing ray cast from the camera ) if none was found it can look at the object parent, and parents parent etc till it finds one, it can also contact ALL parents if they have a listener on them, simple really. I can also have it auto add a component to the touched object that caches all this so it is fast without having to perform lookups every time.. like a boss
So code to have good component orientated design to handle touching the iPad screen:
But that's a bit misleading as that contains code to auto add components and handle duplicate objects, singletons and such
:-)
But you get the idea, every little tiny thing, involves 100 other tiny things and so on
Lets not even think about how the ray cast to find the touched object itself is leaning on 1000's of lines of physic engine code and scene caches to aid in speed
Speaking of ridiculous code, I have been slowly write examples for various c# concepts and functionality...
All of this, and none of it actually visibly does a damn thing. In fact at his point all I have done in Unity is make a box move, but I decided to learn the language first so learn it I shall *grumble*
Unity3D is amazing, great, wonderful etc etc
And then you get all excited about having spent all year reading and learning C# in depth like a boss. Having read the entire Unity manual, 100's of articles.... 1000's of articles....
And then... aaaand then... you can't even figure out how to draw a simple rounded rectangle on the screen to make a button. Basic things you take for granted in Flash completely missing in Unity. As Unity really is more of an operating system for making things. And so off you must head to the asset store and goole to find someone else's code to solve this. And then you find dozens of approaches, some long ago abandoned and longer updated, and the best ones no longer developed as Unity snatched the debs up and employed them! How is drawing a simple shape so complicated!
In any case, I decided to create a rounded rectangle in vector style using no bitmap data, found Vectrosity was super good at turn lines into polygons that then draw on the screen to look like well... lines. Nicked some kind to draw circles, put them together in a class and tadda the rounded rectangle drawing class was born:
And yah it has a glitch in it, but otherwise good job team me only took me several days of googling and trying to find a compromise
Ok now to just draw it the size I want and make it fit the width of the screen on ipad/ios etc etc...
Seriously... ok this too is hard apparently!
Which sprite / UI manager do I use, NGUI, SpriteManager, EZGUI..... on and on, oh Unity is bring out a new GUI system... they said a year ago... ok can't wait for that
Screw it, made my own Transform like class with relative scaling, positioning and all that fancy jazz. Took longer than I thought... many days arguably wasted
:-)
Now I need to draw my Logo, but at a different location and scale depending on the screen size, screen dpi.. orientation... oh god, what can of worms is this....
So I write that by having multiple copies of my special Transform and a script that picks which one of those to use based on criteria....
And there you have it, several weeks to get my logo and a rounded rectangle drawn to the screen exactly where I want it
This while making a game thing... could end up taking quite some time I think :-S
In the process made some weird looking stuff!
First attempt at rounded rectangle created some weird bacon like creations:
Rectangles ahoy:
Playtime with procedurally rounded rectangles!, Oh the fun I have:
Tinkered with making 3D looking text:
While a dead end due to technical limitations amongst other things, I enjoyed exploring the visual style of what I cam to call 'Lumen'
Here are some of the explorations
It is always darkest, just before it goes pitch black, so only shadows comfort me
Got Unity tracing to Terminal.app in ANSI Color, and with stack tracing if needed wool
And Syntax colour for MonoDevelop, bit pink but what the hell, based on Xcode but Dark
Finally Photoshop has a Dark UI! Rejoyce!
This is a Logo I recently designed for my new company... which will just be me.. for now
:-)
And of course by company I mean I thought up a name and made a logo nothing official yetI have been tossing around various concepts for games for ages now, along with learning real programming languages for the first time unless you count Flash AS3 which is close really.
I didn't mean to design a logo before I even have a game or even a wireframe of a game, but one thing lead to another and out it popped one day.
I guess I have just been so utterly bored of writing code (AS3 with this Topps Tiles job) and studying the manuals of Unity 3D and C Sharp without having produced anything tangible or visual in forever.
I am swinging between incredibly apprehensive and eager to start making games by myself. I just know It's going to turn out to be way more difficult and wrought with disaster that I expect, and I already expect it to be the toughest thing I have ever done. I think I have a relatively unique edge over most people though, it been a long time coming; things have guided me down this path for my whole life I feel, it is my destiny!
I would really love to work with a small team of people instead of it just being me, but to start off it really has to be just me. If it works out, if at some point I prove I have got the taste, the broad skills to pull it off even on a small scale.. then I can start thinking about investing in people to work with.
Right now It's early days, a delicate and fragile thought that could poof out of existence unless carefully nurtured and then fiercely executed.
I have learned a tremendous amount of skills especially over past few years that go nicely towards this, sadly not much in the way of physical evidence to show for it, but It's in my head all right.
If I can just nail execution, and work hard, I can do it
And if I can just stop thinking about how incredibly over saturated the market is and how I could just as easily make $100,000 as I could drift off in the wind and make nothing...
:-|
And that's even if I can pull my shit together and execute 50 hour work weeks for 6 months and not implode, creating your own deadlines and sticking to them is tricky stuff. Creating your own inertia with no guarantee of payoff.
Ok heres the various historical progress / messing about:
Link: helios.mine.nu --- Y2011-Mo11-RoundTree
