So, I mentioned that I had three main objectives to achieve. Let’s keep things straightforward by dividing into these categories.
Documenting Progress
Lets get the last one out of the way first. Document my progress. That’s facilitated by this website, and a collection of blog posts to review the information. It’s simple right now, but that’s fine, it works.
I’ve thought about including links to the videos and articles that I read for my reference and to help anyone else that might stumble across this (if that’s you, hello!) I can also try to maintain a central resources list too, but I might save that one for later.
I mentioned in my last post about trying to make these posts every week. I don’t want to hold myself to anything too rigid, but I do need some kind of framework. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
Monthly posts will most closely follow a pattern to concisely highlight progress over the month. I’ll split it into:
- State of any current projects
- What I achieved over the last month
- What I learned
- Blockers for next steps
- Aims for next month
- Biggest achievement (if relevant)
- Biggest setback (if relevant)
- Top resources (if any)
These will be relatively concise for quick skimming, more detail can be saved for the weekly posts. These will be a bit more freeform, but should still summarise what I got done over the week.
And lastly, ad-hoc posts (like this one) for whenever there’s topics that need deeper discussion, or just something that I wanted to write about. I hope they aren’t boring, but this is meant for my own benefit first and foremost, so, sorry if you find this one a bit of a drag.
I think, as far as I can do for now, that’s job done. If I keep up with it, then it’ll succeed. If I don’t, then it’s failed. That’s not for me to know yet.
Learn the Systems
Okay, so that was a little vague. What I meant was to learn how to make a game again. Whether I’m using an off-the-shelf game engine or writing my own (yeah, right)
I did some research based on what I already know. Unreal Engine is a good bet for making stuff that looks really good. Like, really good. But coding is either drag and drop, or in C++. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying, but neither of those sound like much fun.
Okay, Unity then. I already know Unity, it’s what I learned all about during my years at university. While I didn’t try to keep up to date with game dev news, I’ve heard horror stories about it’s performance, not to mention their attempt to introduce a rather unpopular pricing change, which they quickly changed their mind about. Okay, that’s not exactly great news. But at least I can use C# to create my games.
And then, a rather simple piece of advice I came across while doing some internet-opinion-hunting: Just make the game with whatever you already have.
That’s so simple, it might just work. I mean, lets think about it. Why invest all that time learning another programming language when I can be spending that time making a better game? There’s nothing wrong with C# – it’ll do just as good a job as anything else, for the most part. And the idea is nice, right? Just make something. Make a complete game and release it to the world.
So Unity it is. Less to re-learn and stumble around trying to figure out. First things first, let’s find some tutorials to get back up to speed with Unity. I came across a YouTube video by Versatile Vertices which lays claim to the “BEST” way to learn Unity. It’s pretty short, but frankly, gives good advice. I would have completely disregarded using Unity’s own learning platform. It’s named without much inspiration, but much clarity, Unity Learn. And that’s as far as I’ve made it on that front so far. I’ll check this out once my PC is up and running.
While I’m without the computer, I’ve read through a series of articles on Unity multiplayer by MY.GAMES. A lot of that went over my head, and I know multiplayer is a monster task, but I figured, why not start chipping away now? I’m sure I’ll be revisiting this again in the near future.
Design the Game
Possibly the most straightforward of the lot, but surprisingly I haven’t put much into this. I already mentioned about using a mind map to quickly jot down ideas, and I’ve found a reasonable looking option called WiseMapping. It’s a little clunky in places, but it’s free and offline, so I don’t have to worry about it suddenly being unavailable, or charging prices I can’t justify.
Beyond downloading the desktop app (I’ll switch over to the Docker version once I have my computer back), I haven’t done much more with this. But I mean, it’s one day since my last post, so I’ll give myself a pass.