A teaser wallpaper for an upcoming game that a friend and I are working on.
Its basically a tower defense game, but with a twist… oh… and its an idle game, which means you can play it… while not playing it! 😉
introducing Noodles the Ninja Panda… Beware! He rarely comes alone… He is backed up by an army of ninja pandas, sure to bring on pandamonium for those who stand in his way! 😉
Finally managed to chew my way through the entire Unity Game Development Essentials book! What this means, hopefully, is that I now have a more firm grasp of the techniques needed to create a game from scratch…
To be honest, I knew most of these things before I read the book, however, it did feature a fair amount of techniques and methods that I DIDNT know about before… So it was quite a valuable learning experience, and I am glad I got the book in the first place 🙂
I’ve also been doing a bit of drawing, and the result is this work in progress picture of the heroine, First Aid. It is a character that I created while playing the massive multiplayer online game called Champions Online (that game has one of the most versatile character creation systems in any game I’ve played so far… You can design so many different appearances… its great for coming up with quick rough ideas for characters that you can build from! )
You can also visit my flickr gallery by clicking the image of First Aid and see my other drawings, including some earlier versions of the First Aid picture 🙂
anyways… Done with the book, and getting ready to make a mini-game… so stay tuned! 🙂
Not the most productive day today… Wasnt really getting the code and sorta fell asleep everytime I tried to get into it 😉
So I decided it was time to do the painting of the day… I’ve made a sort of pact with myself that I will do my best to draw at least 1 painting (even if its a simple one, like the one i did today)… Every day, for the rest of my life… … Okay… Maybe not everyday… 😛
But yeah, the aim is for me to practice and get back into the groove of things with digital painting. I never studied art or took classes or lessons, I just draw whenever the mood strikes… But I would definetely love to improve… and THATS where the daily painting comes in 🙂
I read up on different methods of painting/colouring, and I look at other people’s stuff for inspiration.. And then go back and do my daily painting :p
You know what they say… A painting a day, keeps the empty white piece of paper away. Okay, so they dont say that, and I just made that up… but how can you resist when you can pretty much put anything in front of, and between, day and away 😛
Recently I’ve been having a bit of a dilemma… You see, creating games requires alot of different talents, ranging from Sound Design and Visual Arts… to Programming… and just plain old fashioned creativity…
So with all these options or paths in game design, I’ve had a bit of a hard time focusing on 1 thing… Do I practice drawing every day to get better ? Or should I focus 100% on programming… and what about music ? and 3d modelling!
Decisions Decisions… Makes me wish the day had more hours… preferably 50+ hours pr day, that would be ideal for me 😉
So for the past few days I have focused on the programming, and tried to get at least 1½-2 hours worth of drawing in as well. I reinstalled my tablet on my new pc, and started looking for all the digital brushes that I had gathered in the past for my old pc.
And by the end of the night, I had managed to paint a concept art (its not really that useful, since I dont see it being used in a game or anything… but it was still a satisfying experience to finish a piece… even if it is relatively basic painting of a mountain scene… with a bunch of magic thrown in for effect 😉 )
I also did alot of work in Unity. I’ve now read and understood up until the 6th chapter in the Will Goldstone book called: Unity Game Development Essentials. 🙂 I highly recommend this book for anyone new to Unity.
Chapter 1 to 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
I am off work for a week now, and I will be focusing strongly on drawing practice as well learning more programming in the next 7 days, so stay tuned for updates 🙂
Hi All… or.. hello whoever is left checking this blog :p
Sorry for my absense… Things havent quite gone the way I intended them to go lately, but It will get sorted soon enough.
I’ve been working through the chapters of Will Goldstone’s book: Unity Game Development Essentials (I am currently at Chapter 3) , meaning… I havent gotten very far… But in dark and gloomy winter times… Progress is Progress.
Here’s a little screenshot of what my progress looks like currently.. its not much, but at least it shows that I am doing something, and getting somewhere. The aim of the exercises in the book is to reach a point where I’ve created a playable little outdoor area with a few puzzles, and the game is controlled with a first person shooter perspective, like quake/counterstrike.
In other news… I’ve also drawn some pictures while i was absent from my blog… Mostly inspired by fantasy games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest… As you can see by the image of the Tauren and the other picture showing the magic using woman with extremely skinny legs (Yes, my apologies to http://www.idrawgirls.com … I didnt quite take all of your teachings to heart… yet heheh )
And… I have also been trying my hand at music making… I’m still quite a novice at that, but I am enjoying it very much, and I find that the process of hearing your results instantly, and adding sounds as you go along… very rewarding 🙂
If you like any of these, please dont hesitate to rate or comment on them, I would very much appreciate a bit of feedback as I am still very much a beginner. The music was made with various soundpools that i recorded/purchased and then put together in Magix Music Maker. Still have a long way to go in terms of recording my own sound samples, but I’ll get there eventually 🙂
Oh, and I ordered a converter/cable thingy so that I can finally get my old hard-drive content transfered to my new pc… Yes, I am a bit slack.
TastyGraph, over and out… until next time, and surely there wont be another month until next update… I promise 🙂
Super busy week AND weekend this week… Christmas and Chanukah is drawing nearer, which means a little less time to spend on my game project… but on a more positive note… it also means more time spent with my family and in particular my little niece Sara 🙂
My Brother is coming home from Ireland where he has been working since last year. Another great reason to spend time with the family 😉
Anyways, enough about me and my family, and more about the game, right? 😉
I tried adding in a PAUSE function for the game, but sadly that just lead to me crashing my Unity3d… over and over and over and over again… So I decided to grab a little break from THAT feature and add in something else instead.
Something that I know some of you have requested. The Level-Select feature. Yep, now you’re able to pick which map to play on. The list will automatically update itself as you reach new levels, and add those levels to the list of available levels on your Level-Selection screen in the Main-Menu.
As some of you may or may not have noticed, sometimes the +50, +250, +500 score feedback would fly off in the wrong directions after you grabbed their respective gemstones… The reason for this was that I am still very much a beginner with 3d modelling, and as such, I had the rotation wrong on my gemstones… which also leads to the gems being rotated wrong after they spawn from a trap. This has been KINDA fixed. Meaning I didnt fix the actual rotation on the gemstones, I just made sure that everytime the Score-Feedback spawns, it will have the right rotation. So yeah… It will now always fly straight up, as it should, instead of going all woogy and flying left or right 😉
The Gemstones still end up woogy though 😛 But that will be fixed eventually when I figure out how to do it properly 😉
Also, today, you will see a new thing on the blogposts, something which I will be striving to add onto all my posts from now on. Thanks to TecFail for the suggestion on having an easier overview of what was added to the game in each update.
Fixes and Changes in today’s update:
“Select Level” menu option added
fixed the score feedback flying in wrong directions
drew a crap ton of Concept Art and wrote several pages of story and mechanics the game… none of which you can see! leading you to believe I did nothing in the past week 😉
I went and got myself a couple of video tutorials on stylized male anatomy drawing and digital rendering… So while I was watching the tutorials, I did some sketching/drawing and tried my best to keep up… I figured it would be useful for me to practice my drawing skills a little bit (read: alot!) so that I would be better suited to draw concept art and ideas for the game 🙂
Here’s a learning experience of mine from today… Its NOT meant to be used in the game or anything like that 🙂
You can see some of the steps involved in drawing it on my flickr page, if you click the picture…