Dipping our Devilish Toes into Devilian

That's a lot of alliteration, Al! 

For the most part, I'm actually pretty good these days at resisting Hype, with a capital H. Devilian's been bouncing around my social media circles for some time now as it rolled through one beta after a next, and I looked at it long enough to say "Oh, a Diablo Knockoff", and that was pretty much it. But Monday it popped up on the radar again being just a few days from their official launch, and I gave it a bit more consideration. First, I'm a huge fan of the South Korean MMO art style it uses, heavily reminiscent of games like Tera, Blade & Soul, and Aion.  In fact, Bluehole Ginno, the south korean developers, are also the developers of Tera. So that should tell you something about what you can expect in terms of art style. And more to the point - the level of dress, or undress, as it were, you can expect to find most of the female models. Second, it's being published here in the West by Trion Worlds, a publisher I have a fair amount of respect for. Rift is a fine MMO, and I've spent plenty of hours in Defiance. And third, the early access founder's pack was at a very reasonable $20.00 US. So I shelled out a Jackson, patched up my Glyph launcher, and started the download. And so far, I'm quite glad I did. Now, a few days later, here's what I've learned about Devilian.

Unity3D At Home Project Day 13 - Pushing On!

So just have a bit of time this morning before work, but wanted to get some thoughts down. And mostly, those thoughts are around carrying on the fight, and deciding where to go next. Let's get to it shall we?

Unity3D At Home Project - Day 12 - Explosions and Stuff!

So first apologies that this next update took a little longer. First - Thanksgiving. And second, and this is more to the point - but ran into quite a few problems working through the next pieces, and it took longer than I would have liked to get everything working the way I wanted it to. And there are still issues, but it's time to post an update! We've got quite a bit to cover in this one, so let's get to it!

Unity3D At Home Project - Day 11 - Weapons & Effects

So now's the point of the project where we roll up our sleeves and really start to dig in. I talked about all the ways in which our design space can go in last week, and about constraining your execution as much as possible. But even so, we just have a heck of a lot to go and build. I've got a lot of ground to cover in this blog alone, and we're still only about half way through implementing a single weapon. So let's get to it!

Unity3D At Home Project - Day 10 - From Simulation to Gameplay

So this is a bit of an interim post, where I just talk about game developery things, without having done real work on the game itself. As such, it's likely to turn into a rambling diatribe that no one actually gets to the bottom of, but there's a process that happens here - it's really important - and one of the reasons I'm doing this blog as I make this game is to share the things I've learned from fifteen years of game developement. So here goes.

Unity3d At Home Project - Day 9 - Twistin' by the Pool

So this week is a story about getting sidetracked, about building things you didn't expect to build, and that sometimes it's exactly what you need to do, and sometimes it's exactly what you want to avoid, and of course there's no easy way to tell the difference.

Unity At Home Project - Day 8 - Sound Effects

First, I have to start off with stupid things I do. This morning, I blew almost the entire morning trying to find a good plugin, piece of javascript, whatever, to allow me to imbed code snippets into blogger. Sadly, while my C# is strong, my javascript is weak, and though I found several alternatives, I was at every turn foiled in some way or another. Two hours later, I'm no better off than I was before, but out two hours of my time. I'm still fuming about it, so I just had to put a quick rant up. I'm sure I'll tackle the problem again, or maybe use a GitHub gist.

In the meantime, let's talk about this week's goal - getting some sound effects on our walking mechs. Again, my original goal was pretty simple - get an engine sound, and some walking legs sounds on the mech, and that's pretty much it.  Of course, as we'll discover, even the most simplest of goals can be fraught with peril!