So, as promised, here is my first entry, post-changing-teams.
I began playing around with Unity about a year ago. Up until that point, my impressions (sadly) were formed on unsubstantiated negative heresay and the handful of student games I'd seen which didn't particularly sell it as a bad-ass indy toolkit in a world which had just received UDK for free.
So I'd heard about this thing called Unity, but to be perfectly honest... UNREALENGINEOMG.
Between then and now, I flip-flopped between XNA and UDK. XNA because it was super easy to code with and I'd been learning C#/XNA for 18 months or so, and UDK because it's so good at making stuff look insanely sexy.
But whenever I tried to learn to code in UDK, I hit a wall of outdated tutorials, limited video resources, and a small community who were too busy to answer my inane questions. I had a lot of trouble advancing in UDK beyond a graphics toolset.
I was much more successful in my "learn to make games" self education in XNA. I actually made quite a few little playable (albeit unpublishable) mini-games. Most didn't have a point, and some didn't even have gameplay. But it was fun, and it was learning, and it was going somewhere. Documented on this blog are a few examples of some games I loosely call 'in progress', because when it came down to it, I had no idea how to do 3D in XNA, and I kept getting bogged down in attempting to make a functional game editor for my 2D ideas. I made an aweful lot of progress, but not a lot of product.
Then I decided to try Unity again, after reading about it in a much more positive light. First delightful surprise was how easy it is to navigate: Within minutes, I was moving through the interface, adding entities, getting things happening without so much as a peek at a tutorial. After the first hour, I had an actual mini-game, playable. Not particularly fun or inspired, but certainly inspiring.
The next thing that surprised me was the asset pipeline. Importing Maya assets directly? Truly, what voodoo magic is this?!
And then, I discovered that Unity is quite happy to let me script in C#. It can't be understated how important this is to me. I'm not a programmer. Learning to program, even to the intermediate-ish level that I'm at, was an arduous and time-consuming task: I'm talking an hour or two every single night for the last two years. And it just so happens that the language I learned to code in was C#.
Unity and I seemed to be made for each other.
So the last few days I've really started to dive in. I have (from scratch, or almost from scratch), a side-scrolling platformer, with a really nice, tight feel to the player controls. I enjoy just jumping around (there's even a double jump!). There's also a smooth tracking camera, portals, screen fades, and I just added a camera-shake effect. It all works so nicely, I'd like to squirt a little lemon in my eye just so I can wipe away a tear of happiness.
The next thing I'd like to try to create is a pickup of some sort. Maybe a power-up that applies a temporary boost to player speed, or something else like that.
It's all just white boxes and white capsules and white spheres at the moment - no art to speak of. But that's okay. For the first time since I began this journey, I have something truly playable, and I can't wait to make it sexy.
I'm wondering how mister-green-short-shorts-pirate-guy might look as a 3D character...
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