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  • Archive for September, 2010

    Hours 6 – 10 : More thoughts on SpaceOreMiner


    2010 - 09.27

    Very pleased with how things have gone so far. I now have pretty much all the major game play components – deformable terrian, player movement, ore spawns and the laser. The most annoying thing to be completely honest during these hours had nothing to do with the game itself, the biggest problem was the bottleneck YouTube presented.

    Aside from that niggle, everything went pretty smoothly. Definitely getting better at moving the scene camera around inside Unity. It was pretty frustating at first, but its very much something that you just need to get the hang of. As for scripting, I’ve been producing both c# and js code, mixing and matching them purely to see how it all works, and it all works pretty damn well. It’s a very different approach to development to what I am used to but it really seems to work pretty well.

    Very happy with where I am in the development process. Just over half way through my assigned time limit, and I have everything I want. Now its just a case of turning what I have into an actual game.

    For the rest of the week ( i.e. Monday to Friday ) my time is pretty limited, so I am planning to just do an hour a night of coding. YouTube/blog posts will come after this hour of time. Then on Saturday do a four hour session, and hopefully have a game at the end of it 🙂

    Some things that I need to address in the next few hours :

    1.Laser beam. Need to make it look like a huge freakin’ rock blasting mining laser from hell.
    2.Movement. Currently when I’m moving the mole around, I am very aware I’m just moving forward/backward/left and right. I need to change that, and change how gravity works so the movement falls into the way I want it to be moved.
    3.Inventory. Currently ores are just destroyed on collision with the mole. This needs to change so that the mole actually stores up to 10 different ores.
    4.Actual game play mechanics. Both movement up and firing the laser should use some form of energy, returning to surface ( where the Limar will be ) will recharge this energy. Also at this point the ores stored in the mole should be removed, and points/credits/score/dollarpounds should be added.
    5.Lighting. Currently everything looks really bland. I need to add some light sources in to improve how things look.

    Five points, and five hours till Saturday, hmmm, maybe that is a sign of the state the game will be in on Saturday. I can but hope 🙂

    tl:dr; everything going better than I had hoped – and youtube sucks

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    Hour 10 : Looking much more like a game


    2010 - 09.26

    Had an awesome five hours.  Well excited about the progress so far!  Prefabs spawning randomly around the map and the mining mechanic works great, and now you can even ‘collect’ the ore.  By ‘collect’ I mean you bump into it and it is destroyed 🙂  Just about to upload hour 10 to YouTube, but who knows if they will appear or not 🙂

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    Hour 9 : Spawning lots of objects!


    2010 - 09.26

    Got my ores spawning in game now.  A helluva lot of ores, was quite impressed at unity for not falling over when I started to spawn models from a loop.  Definately getting there.  Ores are currently spawned in a looped pattern, so regularly, first task for next hour is to make sure they arn’t so uniform 🙂

    Youtube wise, I’m still uploading the videos, and hope they actually get processed over night or something.

    Edit : This one processed :

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    Hour 8 : Melting the ground around my laser


    2010 - 09.26

    Just finished a fundamental game mechanic – the mining laser now melts the ground where it hits.  Pretty sweet.  This was where I wanted to get to within this latest batch of five hours.  So quite happy 🙂 everything now is bonus time! 🙂 Will be working on spawning my ores around me now 🙂

    Note : Hour 7 YouTube video seems to be stuck processing.  It uploaded, but instead of the pseudo-realtime preview it normally gives, nothing happened.  Have a green bar saying : ‘Your file has been uploaded. We are now processing the video…’ so no idea when it will turn up, or even if I can upload anymore tonight.  I’ve still got all the original video files, so if hour 7 is causing a problem, I will just re-upload it later.

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    Hour 7 : Making pew pew noises


    2010 - 09.26

    Added a laser, which really does nothing at the moment, except get shorter when it hits something.  Annoyingly, all the info I could find dealt with first person cameras, had to tweak quite a lot to get it working in third person, but it seems to be working pretty well for me 🙂

    Edit : This video should work once YouTube has processed it, just sticking it here for when ( or if ) that happens 🙂

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