DAY TWO: TRYING TO DO THE HOMEBREW DEVELOPER THING
Presumably, you've already read Part One in this multi-part series of articles about trying to make a demo of a bowling game, as a one-man show, at home, using one of the three big homebrew game dev tools available today -- Virtools, Unity 3D, and Torque Engine Builder. Here comes Part Two ...Tech decisions made for me by lack of tech. I planned to buy a PC so I could test out Virtools as well as Unity. Alas, it never happened (having a car in L.A. = more important than PC), so the decision between Virtools and Unity was made for me by my lack of PC and my abundance of Mac.
Supposedly, Virtools is the more professional, production-capable, if pricier solution. For reference, here's a frequently recycled quote from my credible programmer friend, Gregg Tavarres, who when last we spoke was working as a tech lead on PlayStation 3 software at SCEI.
"One of our designers convinced management to give him a month to play with it. In that month, he was able to create an entire level for a character action game on his own. This designer had his character walking around, he had animals you could hop on and ride, he had three or four kinds of enemies you could interact with, he had non-player characters you could recruit and command to do various things. He had several game setups, cliffs you could climb, moving platforms, all kinds of stuff … and he had done all of this in a single month without any programming experience whatsoever."
So yeah, sadly, Virtools is out and Unity is in. Thankfully, Unity's user community is quite active, so info on the software is plentiful and detailed and I've spent what few free days I have absorbing knowledge with the abandon of a wino's liver.
Should you be interested, here's the general Wiki and here are the tutorials.
After having gone through all the basic tutorials, I began to start messing around with building stuff. On the left is a picture of my first attempt at a bowling ball on a piece of alley surface. Both have rigid-body physics applied to them, thanks to a very easy one-click process. Right now, I'll admit it it looks like crap.
For basic stuff, the usability is, thus far, excellent. Importing assets is as easy as simply saving a file and placing it in the “assets” folder within your project directory externally from the software. Even Photoshop PSD textures can be created, saved in the assets folder, and then, as you update the PSD file, have it update automatically within the game file. Right now, I’ve hit a slump with the scripting as I haven’t broken through to a level of sufficient understanding where I can start experimenting yet. Some folks have uploaded pre-written scripts, so now my next step is to go through them, analyze them, and start adding game behaviors and controllers, along with the 10 pins I’ll have to build externally in MAX or Cheetah. Design decisions now more realistic after initial design comedown. So my original design concept is now scaled back to focusing on a polished and competent purist-focused bowling game as the first stage. After that’s done right, I’ll refine it, build on top of it, and then implement all the crazy stuff piece by piece. In short, focus on a strong foundation and then add something a little odd and experimental, so if the abstract stuff sucks and I have to kill it, the heart of something pure and quality will be there. My goal now is physics-based bowling with multiple layers of control: roll, spin, and bounce. Plus, of course, controlling the speed of all these things and choosing the mass of the chosen ball. Shouldn’t be a problem as Unity has AGEIA physics built in, and I’ve already seen some of it working through the particles and object collision demos that you can view in the many video tutorials and game downloads. Thus far, my experience with Unity 3D has me largely optimistic about being able to pull this off, even with the scripting hurdle that is currently tying my brain into one of those optical-illusion-type knots. I’m still upset that I couldn’t play with Virtools, as it’s said to have the most user-friendly environments of the three pieces of software mentioned previously. Next month, we’ll probably have some comedy physics problems and controller tests provided the scripting doesn’t melt my brain. And, hopefully, a playable work-in-progress! Oh, yes! No messing around here, folks.
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>> DAY TWO: TRYING TO DO THE HOMEBREW DEVELOPER THING
Presumably, you've already read Part One in this multi-part series of articles about trying to make a demo of a bowling game, as a one-man show, at home, using one of the three big homebrew game dev tools available today -- Virtools, Unity 3D, and Torque Engine Builder. Here comes Part Two ...
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>> Day One: Trying To Do
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What you are about to read is the first in a series of articles about trying to make a game demo, as a one-man show, at home, using one of the three big homebrew game dev tools available today -- Virtools, Unity 3D, and Torque Engine Builder.
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