Indie Developer seeks world domination
Only just managed to get it working in time for the end of hour video – which is currently uploading now, automagic tweet will show the location, will come back and edit all the posts at the end of this five hours. Terrain is now deformed around the mole as the mole moves around the asteroid.
( forgot to change the aspect ratio before recording – d’oh )
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So now is the day after the five hours before 🙂 Looking back at it I think it went pretty well. Downloading Blender and installing it was pretty simple. I even had python pre-installed, so that went without a hitch. I can see how amazingly powerful it is as a tool. The draw back being an incredibly complicated UI. Definitely need to spend some time with Blender in order to get better at it. Quite pleased at how the models went, though initially I had wanted to get them all done in the first hour. However, I think this was pretty unrealistic in retrospect. Will totally need to spend some time on UV mapping the Limar and the Mole after the 19 hours, but so far quite please with the progress there.
Downloading and installing Unity3d was even easier 🙂 It needs to be activated online where you have the choice of either picking a 30 day trail of the pro version, or an unlimited version of the indie version. You need to give it an email address as well. I’m glad I didn’t pick the pro version, I think being exposed to the uber version, then having to downgrade after it would be pretty sucky. But each to their own, its nice that they have the option to trail it.
Now about Unity itself. I am loving it. Everything seems really simple and really logical. This is always good. I haven’t had too much of a problem with the UI at all ( though navigating in the scene view window is a bit clumsy feeling at the moment, but I have a feeling that is my relative newness to it ). So far, however, everything I’ve done has been pretty generic in nature. I’m starting the meat of the coding today, will be interesting to see if the speed of progress continues once I am doing more specific things.
The 19 hour challenge overall is definitely a very interesting way of developing. Though I know I am mostly writing/recording/talking/tweeting to nothing but search spiders, I am finding it a great way of motivating myself. However, taking a 5 minute break within every hour to write the blog post and record/upload a video is actually a bit of a nightmare – uploading a video to YouTube completely kills my home internet, and as I am alt+tabbing between unity3d and google, this is a bit of a hindrance to development 🙂 So from now on I will be doing the hour, then after the hour, making the videos and writing the blog entry.
So there is a brief overview of my thoughts on the first five hours. I’m hoping to do another five hours today, but alas, I have some chores that need to be done first, so will have to come back and announce when they are starting later.
tl:dr; Blender rocks, Unity3d rocks
lamentconfigManaged to get the camera in the position that I want it to be in, as well as working out how I am going to do the environmental detail to give the illusion of being underground. The FPS counter mentioned in the video can be found here. Incredibly simple to use, just create a GUIText component, and drop the script into it. The FPS counter reads a pretty constant 66 during the video, but the video is clearly recording a much lower framerate than that. All the movement is very smooth while I’m recording 🙂 I will have a fiddle around with my CamStudio settings later.
Well, that is the first five hours gone, and I’m going to go grab some dinner, before planning tomorrows progress.
lamentconfigPlayed around with a lot of stuff this hour, and tweaked the render settings to make things look much more cool – Very cool to be able to play around with so much considering how new I am to unity. Everything seems pretty easy so far. I’ve been playing around with scripting as well. Hour five is my last hour for today, and will be me trying to construct a third person camera, along with playing with the code behind the keyboard control. Should be fun! 🙂
lamentconfigQuick hour 3 update, will start to keep these brief as the YouTube videos contain the meat of the content 🙂 Found it was very very very easy to add first person controls and camera to an object in Unity3d. Now hopefully I can make things look much better in hour 4. The automatic tweet worked great, so will keep that running for now.
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