Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials Book

February 1st, 2012

Just one more unity book for now =)

This is by far the best unity book I've had the opportunity to read. It's well written, easy to follow, and covers a lot of ground. Unlike other books, throughout the book only one example game is made, but the game is far more advanced than if the author would jump from one game to another.

The book goes through all sorts of unity features, including the landscape engine, particle systems, animation, ui, HUD, physics, scripting (in both c# and javascript) - actually, plenty of space is dedicated to scripting, including a chapter that goes through basic concepts like variables, functions and logic structures, but this is all done in a way that's not dumbed down by any means.

Towards the end of the book you can find descriptions of things often forgotten, including doing finishing touches, optimization, steps to publish on the web or standalone, and so on.

If you want to buy one book on unity, this, in my opinion, would be it.

So.

In other news, the Ludum Dare #22 results were published some time ago, and here you can see the results for my 4.8 hour game. #6 in theme, #20 in humour - not bad by any means!

Unity iOS Essentials Book

January 20th, 2012

Our book review series continues.

If you have unity and feel like trying your luck on the iOS market (iphone, ipad), you might want to take a look at this book. It covers the major pitfalls and offers workarounds, as well as giving ballpark figures of what kind of content the devices can handle.

The book does a good job at educating the reader about what's different in developing for a handheld, with its limitations and different controls.

On the negative side, the book could be slightly better organized. As it is, it seems to jump back and forth between really useful information and game design advice which does not necessarily apply to any kind of game. The book also talks about the making of a couple different kinds of games, explaining issues related to them, but could have benefitted from a bare-bones example that would have explained the whole development flow.

So, if you're a unity veteran, and want a reference that covers the limitations and workarounds of the iOS target platform(s), this book might be for you.

MMXII

January 10th, 2012

Where to start..

The new year rolled on, and the world's still here. The new years' was much calmer here than back in Riihimäki, and our dogs actually got it in a relatively relaxed manner. They don't like the fireworks that much. It was also nice to notice that those damn kids didn't keep on using fireworks after the new years' - in earlier years we've had to bear that fun for a couple of months. You're taking your dogs for a peaceful walk, and suddenly something explodes, and then you have a couple of panicked dogs to drag along. Not fun.

As a tradition, I don't do new year's resolutions, but this year I figured I'd try to do some things as self-improvement. And as such, on normal days, I'll try to do a little bit of each of the following;

Some form of physical exercise
Some form of music
Some form of writing

And I mean these in the purest checkbox form. Tap a key on a piano. Do a single pushup. Write something. Of course, I write something every day in the form of communication, but in this case I mean something.. more creative.

I've given myself plenty of loopholes here and it's by design. There are plenty of abnormal days, and sometimes I want to concentrate on one thing or another.

Now, the exercise has been conveniently provided by the snowfall that's finally here, as well as taking the dogs out for walks in less-than-optimal weather. Additionally I should remember to do my back-strenghtening moves, which I've let myself forget way too often.

As for music, I can't compose, I can't play, I don't know jack about notes or whatnot, but it's fun to play around, and I hope to learn. I bought a 100e USB midi keyboard a while back (Alesis Q49) and at the suggestion from my brother (among others), I bought license to renoise as well. The keyboard did come with a lite version of ableton live, and I did do some stuff with it (including sound to some ludum dare entry), but I think I have some kind of feeling of what's going on in the tracker format of renoise.

I may post links to some stuff I've managed to record. Maybe. At least if I can figure out how to embed oggs in some sensible manner. I've managed to play with music instruments a bit every now and then, sometimes with Niklas playing with me, other times alone.

Writing is something I'd like to get back at. It's been ages since I posted a story, for instance, possibly because unlike my other creative endeavors, I've rarely if ever gotten any feedback for my writing.

I've been thinking of starting a project writing down memories from the Fathammer era, also inviting memories from other fathammerians, but for some reason haven't managed to start. Part of it is that when leaving Fathammer, I destroyed a literal metric cube of notes which would have been an easy source for a book or two, so for most part I only have my memory to go on with.

Another part is writing about funny things without insulting anyone overmuch, including customers and work partners. And of course there are painful memories there as well.

I've been playing a bunch of games lately too. Dead Space 2 was a "more of the same" sequel, so get it if you have to continue the story. In the first game everything was new, there was plenty of mystey and so on, the second ties basically all loose ends, wrapping the dead space universe in a neat little box which means any further games with the same name will be just generic zombie shooters with nothing really special about them. Need zombies to shoot? Take your pick.. Evil god, virus, nanomachines, alien technology.. who cares, they're violent, brainless, anonymous and go into pieces when shot...

The steam sales came and went, and I surprised myself by not buying lots of games. Reason being, everything I wanted I already owned, or were still over 20e, and I can wait.

Still, I have a bunch of AAA titles already installed, so guess what I've been playing lately? A freeware visual novel/dating game called Katawa Shoujo, which translates rougly to "cripple girls". Note that the game contains plenty of.. well, "adult" material, so take this recommendation with several grains of salt. You can disable the most offensive material in the options menu though. If you like the genre, or are curious as to what's it about, do take a look. I haven't played much of it yet, but what I've seen has been excellent.

Visual novels are more or less like choose your own adventure games, where you've presented a situation and then a few options as to where to go. As these go, Katawa Shoujo doesn't give you a lot of options, but enough. And there's a lot of content in there.

Ludum Dare #22 came and went, and I managed to put 4.8 hours into an entry - one of over 700 in the contest - and as such I'm more than happy to get 6th position in theme and 20th position in humor (rather ironically, considering I've tried to kill that category several times now)..

I'll just leave you with a walkthrough youtube video of the game. It shows over half of all the content in the game.

(that's enough creative writing for the day..)

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