Back from... somewhere?

Rediscovered this old blog, imported (painfully!) the old Posterous blog entries, and will start using this to help force myself to keep going. Or start again. Or whatever.

I haven't touched Marooned! stuff in quite a while, but I haven't given up on it. I think about it quite often and have been jotting things down randomly...

I LIVE

I'm embarassed to say that I've forgotten how to update Posterous via email; I've actually been working on a bunch of stuff related to Marooned! over the past year, and tweeting about it under @marooned_game.

• OpenAchievement for in-game achievements.
• UnitySimpleMapGenerator for generating realistic random maps.
• Learning how to use Unity. Yeah, I'm really slow on this one for some reason; not enough time to site an concentrate on it, I guess.

I still want to play Marooned!, so I'd better get a move on...

State of the Artist

Yes, I'm still here, and I'm still working towards making Marooned! into a game I can have fun playing.

So, where am I?  Let's see:

• Finished watching and following along with the Space Shooter tutorials from 3DBuzz.
• Half-way through Challenges For Game Designers.
• Received Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames from my lovely wife for Christmas.

When it comes to Marooned!, I've moved it to a hex-based grid and am looking into implementing a hex-grid prefab that might be useful to folks making RPGs, RTSes, etc. If it's useful, it'll be on Unity Prefabs and/or the Unity Asset Store… it'd be neat to make some money related to game development like the mighty WyldFire. ;-)

Despite finding some great hex-grid resources on the Internet, I've been stalled for a few days wondering about implementation. Do I:

• Make the hexes just something that exists on top of a plane or mesh?
• Make the hexes as hex-shaped objects?

If the hexes are objects, each hex can have its own height, which would be an easy way to add a third dimension, although it would be chunky because the transition between heights would be sudden and absolute at the edges of the hexes. Alternatively, I could do some sort of average between the edges, and only the centre of the hex would be at that hex's height.

If the hexes live on top of a mesh, I'll need to figure out the hex's height from the underlying mesh, and how to project the hex grid onto the mesh in a sensible manner.

On the third hand, I could go back to ignoring 3D and just draw in 2D. If I do this the graphics have to be adjusted to show as isometric and the camera is entirely fixed… doing it in 3D would let me (or even the player) tweak the camera's position/angle without adjusting the graphics by hand. But I'd need (simple) 3D models instead of just sprites.

This is why I never get anything done.

Is this thing on, again?

Still trying to aim posts precisely where I expect them to go, ignore.

More progress with Unity

Lots of progress learning Unity over the weekend; again, I have to say how excellent the 3D Buzz's “Simple 2D Shooter” video tutorial series is.

I've ever thought of a few ways I could use @dimeRocker with Marooned!, which might encourage me to put a web version on Facebook or Kongregate…

Plans and ideas are easy to come by though, need to start implementing and executing…

Curse of the Crystal Skull

If you find a Crystal Skull in Marooned!, this is what I had in mind, not that Indiana Jones thing:

Love the story and atmosphere of that, although it's a bit darker than what I want for Marooned!… but @drsteel is a genius.

[Edit: Posterous didn't pick up my tags? Hmm…]

[Edit: This is a video showing song lyrics, and it fades in quietly, so don't panic!]