Android Developing, New 2D in Unity Tutorial
So its been a few days since my last post so here is the latest news over here at PG!
Well it has been spoken about but I am starting to develop for Android, not iPhones as I don’t have a Mac. I will not speak about the game but I will reveal it will be our first fully commercial project for Android phones and tablets.
Don’t worry I will still be working on the Human Cannon until somewhere in May when I will finish it up and release the full version. Development on our new game will be in full swing in the summer an so don’t expect any more details until then, also I may be a bit quite during the summer while I work on it but please keep coming back! Or follow on twitter for the latest news.
On another note I have made a follow up tutorial on doing 2D in Unity by using Owlchemy Labs’ fancy script which makes planes the same aspect ratio as a texture! Yea that sounds pretty cool watch here for the quick tip on game development.
I don’t get along with Unreal
As stated last week I decided to go and have an adventure in UDK and well I wasn’t completely impressed.
For starters I hate the way it ships with Unreal Tournament built into the engine. Some people don’t mind this but I do, especially with larger commercial stuff being worked on. Also everything is extremely over complicated and difficult to learn. My biggest issue with it was when you compile your game it makes an installer with it, rather than a standalone. This is a bad thing because a lot of people don’t like installers and worse than that games submitted to IndieCity have to be give as a standalone so they can compile into their own installers.
So basically if I make a game I would not be able to submit to IndieCity (my plans). The only way to change this, as far as I know is to modify the source code. For that you need a fancy license coming in at a rather cheap 450, 000 dollars.
Okay my rant is over. Sorry about that, the thing that attracted me to UDK was the graphics capability. To rectify my needs I decided at some point in the near future I would do a small side project of doing a Unity Indie tech demo. What I plan to do is push Unity Indie as far as it will go to make a some graphical demo with some really, really nice graphics.
So at some point I will make this tech demo but for now goodbye!
Unity 3.5 is coming!
Hello readers, time for a post!
A couple of weeks ago was the Unite 11 conference were people get together and talk about Unity. Unfortunately I didn’t get around to posting back then but better late than never hey!
Anyways Unity 3.5 is coming out soon and I am so excited I google the release date quite often. No release date yet but apparently it’s going to be fall 2011 which isn’t to long away.
It is going to have a massive amount of new features including an entirely new particle system, a new GUI system and loads of other things. It will also support level of detail rendering which basically lowers the detail in objects the further away they are from the camera so you can have much more detailed scenes with hardly any extra computer cost.
Another new feature mentioned was social api’s so things like GameCenter and Facebook and in-app purchases and all that sort of thing which may not actually be in 3.5 but will come soon after.
Apparently it is going to have 3D rendering capabilities as well and even web cam support for augmented reality games!
Thanks for reading and if you have to know even more read the roadmap at Unity here.
Unity tutorials
After speaking to some twitter followers I have decided to start writing tutorials on what I know about the Unity engine. I do eventually want to make video’s but not for now. I have got a cool idea of mini tutorials relating to little things that got me stuck when I learnt Unity.
I am still confused about advanced tutorials or basic ones as I have had some mixed reactions. So to find out entirely I have poll for you to vote in! You can also vote progressional which will be basic at first then moving on to advanced. It only takes a second to vote so please do and if you have a Facebook account please give us a like on the sidebar!
I’m learning Flash CS5
Yup, this is my new adventure, also part of project KOT’s “learning more about code”. I am doing it properly this time, I have a book and a trial of Flash CS5. Unfortunately Flash pro is 700 dollars so I am having to save up for it but in the mean time I have the trial version.
I’m not sure when I will upload some flash stuff as the book says I am not allowed to upload the tutorial’s unless I modify them some way to make them my own. So when I know enough about flash I will make some simple games that I can put up on the site. One of the big attractions to Flash is the fact that it can be deployed on iOS and Android devices, this a target to reach in the future.
On other news I have been thinking about writing tutorials on Unity. There is a high demand for them and I have been using it long enough to have the knowledge to write a tutorial. Tell me what you think about Unity tutorials either in the comments below or on twitter.
The Unfixable Unity 3.4 problem
A lot of people have been asking about this big problem that I have mentioned in most of my posts recently. So in an attempt to fix it I am putting it out into the public to see if anyone can suggest a fix for it.
I have been trying to get help from Unity and Unity support for over a month now with no luck, so please if you think you can fix it please leave a comment or email me or PM me on twitter, whatever you want, I am desperate for help.
Basically when I look at my shopping basket on Unity’s asset store I click checkout now, it then asks me for details. As I am a member of the asset store my details are already filled so I click “submit”, exactly the same form comes up but this time with no details in it. If I fill it in and click submit, it repeats. If words are not enough for you watch this video I filmed and put on YouTube.
Please leave you suggestion whatever it is, I am open to any help whatsoever!
Dead Lep Revenge logo!!
Ok guys and girls I am sorry about the lack of blog content as I still have not fixed Unity and so cannot work on the creation of Dead Lep Revenge. I am in contact with Unity Technologies themselves and we will hopefully put an end to this terrible problem.
Anyways, although work cannot proceed in coding and creation the art can be created! Our artist, Máire, is working on concept art for the characters which will hopefully be released soon! In the meantime I have made a logo for the game which I think represents the game very well.
Again thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave comments!
Unity Troubles
My last post was about the fantastic new Unity update, now though I am having some troubles. My first investigation of this allegorithmic substance integration caused unity to crash. So I open up Unity again and it crashed in roughly 30 seconds. So I tried one more time and it crashed again. This was Friday and I still have not been able to get unity to stay open more than 30 seconds when experimenting with the new features.
The funding for the next game also came through but Unity is being annoying and so I cannot purchase the necessary assets.
Anyways I have not received very much feedback regarding Treasure Hunt 2 and I would like to know how you are enjoying it, so can I ask if you have played Treasure Hunt 2 can you please leave your own little review in the comments section so I can make the necessary improvements!
Unity 3.4 Is Out
Yup, one the greatest game engines ever made has been updated!
There is many new features some amazing, some small. Most of the updates are for us developers and don’t really concern players. There are some that players may be interested in, for example gyroscope support has been added to Unity iOS and so has terrain, which made Treasure Hunt 2 as good looking as it is. I don’t really develop for iOS at the moment but still it’s cool!
One of the big new features is allegorithmic substance integration, which is as complicated as it seams and I am still trying to work it out! If there are any Unity dev’s out there that can explain it please do!
There is also a cool new thing that has been added called gizmo management. This simply makes developing easier for me. Another cool new feature is script execution order, this will allow me to make certain scripts happen before others. Water and image effects have been improved to make graphics even better!
Thanks for reading and sorry if you found it a bit too complicated and difficult to understand but this is game development, nothing is simple. There is a full list of features and tweaks here and don’t forget to comment!
Unity And 2D games, Should I?
A few posts back I spoke about how I thought 2D games in a 3D game engine such as Unity didn’t work and I was going to make 2D games in XNA. It appears I was wrong.
Some of you might have noticed in the previous video that Zombieville (a 2D game) was made in Unity, I noticed this as well and did some research on it. I found my methods of making a 2D game was a bit off as there is a few different ways of making 2D games in Unity.
I also found an extension for Unity that is dedicated to making 2D games called SpriteManager 2. This is apparently what the pro’s use as it has quite a price tag, anyways I will eventually try and raise the money to buy it as it is the best.
I got a video of an iOS game called Tumbledrop which is a fully 2D game made in Unity so you can see that Unity can make very good 2D games. So check out that video and don’t forget to leave comments as it is a great help to get feedback!