Nollij + Progress

Copyright Bill Watterson, posted with the highest respect.

Note - I was recently hospitalized and am on pain-killers while writing this. I'm aware it's not a great decision to write in this condition, but I've been putting this off for a while. In any case, should my tone get confusing or long-winded, you know why. 

It's hard to quantify the current 'progress' of the Racer project. There were a few false starts, a couple restarts, and for all the time I've found/spent, I can't say there's any tangible progress made towards it. No new models have been rendered, no level has been constructed, no scripts written. That isn't to say I've been slacking off though; I've spent as much time as I possibly can working on making this game happen.

If memory serves me right, my last post regarding the Unity book. Since then, I've read nearly every page, footnote, article, and referred link it's had to offer. With less than 100 pages to go, I'm on the chapter regarding final deployment; how to build the program, last minute efficiency-boosters, things like that. The included tutorial that's run through the book was to make a simple first-person puzzler, and each section of the book shows you basic scripting commands and their practical usages. It's been sort of slow, but the "Survival Island" game is done now. The player is stuck alone on a sizable island, and the goal is to light the campfire to signal for help. One booth has a minigame where you throw coconuts at targets and the player is rewarded with a battery. After finding the other 3 conspicuous batteries, a bunker is powered and its door open, revealing a pack of matches. Total play time is about 2 minutes. Nothing exciting at all, but it's taught me damn near everything I need to know about making the rest of my game.

If I'm honest, it was sort of boring. It was difficult to stay concentrated on it long enough to actually do any of it. I stuck with it because I knew that even though it was taking a lot longer to get to what I wanted to do, I needed a proper foundation of knowledge first. Too many screw-ups have happened, a lot of time has been wasted, and I'd rather just spend a little extra time and do it better. Righter. More correct.

I've also realized that the occasional change of pace helps me stay focused. A couple weeks ago I bought some graph paper, some folders, a clipboard and a few other things so I can work on paper. It's actually been incredibly helpful. I've plotted out several different designs for menus and gui-buttons, character sheets, and I even drew out my Dev Level.

Level 0-1, Click here for big

This is the first thing I'm going to build. It'll have every element that will get used in the game. This includes power-ups, hazards, mechanics, misc items, event triggers, and anything else I can think of. It's strictly going to exist to figure out how things work and getting everything set right. Hopefully though, if I get everything set properly here, I can drag-and-drop it into the levels afterward and not have much to do in terms of 'creating' it.

To further expedite things, I went and got a Blender Book to go along with the Unity Book. It seems a bit more geared to person-character creation (as opposed to vehicular creation) but my track record with Blender so far hasn't been great. It may take making yet another pass at building my two basic vehicles, but at least then it'll be done more correct. I've not started reading it yet; I've wanted to finish the Unity Book and the tutorial project before I tackled it, but it's about to happen.

The next update should have either new vehicle models or some semblance of a playable level. Either way, it's starting to get fun.

PS - I've also been wanting to do an entry regarding the Tower project, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. I recently had some computer problems and had to reformat. I've not reinstalled Visual Studio, and frankly, I think it's been too long that I don't remember much of it. Furthermore, I can probably do it a lot better and easier in Unity later if I really had to. It'd save me the time of writing an entire simulation engine. I dunno. I just feel horrible because EVERY open source SimTower clone I've seen gets about as far as I did, stops, then disappears. I wanted to beat the curse, but maybe not.

Day -3ish, Project Ideas and Planning

Rereading my last post put some things in perspective. Namely that my sights are set pretty high, and there's a lot of work to do over a long period of time. I'm aware of that, and I'm trying to keep myself grounded, but optimistically realistic. I'm not going to make the next Minecraft or Fez or Narbacular Drop, I probably won't have finished product by the end if the year, but maybe I can make a few extra dollars worth of beer money for a bit. I'm quite comfortable with that idea.

Keeping all this in mind, I'm trying to keep everything from here on out clear and focused. Mostly. Wiggle room is always nice to have. Anyway, I've narrowed my scope to 3 games, each with a specific plan of execution. None have names yet, but I'll be referring to them by their base  parts until they do.


1) Racer - A 2d side-scrolling platformer, released as a mobile game. With a proper setup, level/character design should stay simple. Ideally released as a demo (limited number of maps, 3-5 maybe?) and full (possibly extra vehicles, many more maps, possible multiplayer support). If at all possible, no ads on either. The original draft of this idea was a sprite-based Java game, but Unity may prove to be better.


2) Space - A multi-phase game centered around the idea of space exploration. I intend for this one to be far more involved than the previous one, so it can't/won't happen until after I know I have a decent grasp at all of this. With the game itself, I plan on having a "logbook" of semi-random collectibles that occur during normal gameplay, and is ultimately viewed as a 2d map. The unfortunate thing is that I'd like to have real names & representations of established scifi/space related entities (The Enterprise, an X-Wing, etc), but I'm pretty sure there might be some legal issues there. While I don't mind the extra legwork of figuring that part out, I don't have a clue HOW to go about it. Like the previous game, this will be released as a mobile game. If I've figured out iOS stuff by then I'll certainly port it over. Barring that, a slightly longer term extension of the project is to redo parts of the game for a release on Steam.

3) Tower - This one is a labour of love, and I could wax poetically about for a long while. It's an open source clone of SimTower, written in C++ for pc. It'll be released online for free, probably through Github. Because of the nature of the project, I only really plan on working on it sporadically but I'll be more apt to discuss it and share some/all of the code as it happens. I've already started on this one a couple months ago, and it was delayed because of the Minecraft server. This will be the thing I go back to when I need to clear my head, and at all costs I'm determined to finish this one.


So that's it. That's the plan. Just make 3 completely different games, in different languages, from scratch, in their entirety, without spending any significant amount of money. No problem, right?