I fear my lecturers may have been right…

So before I started on my current project, let’s call it Project Game for now, I had only really coded small things. Or done adjustments to larger systems. Because of this I always turned up my nose at Software Engineering lectures.

“Planning before programming? Pah!” I thought arrogantly. Just jump in, code, and see what happens. That was my motto. Now I’m faced with a concept that I’ve planned out mildly roughly in my head, since it’s a game and Design comes first, and now that I’m faced with translating my design to code suddenly I’m going back what I learnt in my Software Engineering lectures.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no way in hell I’m gonna start drawing up UML diagrams for myself, but I have started listing what data needs to be tracked, what classes I’m going to store them in etc.

It’s almost like I’m a proper programmer. Who knows maybe I’ll actually finish Project Game.

What to call the next Modern Shooter?

So in a lecture a couple of weeks ago I was getting a bit bored, the lecturer was rambling on about the “philosphical” implications of AI by simply stating that there are philosphical implications and not actually exploring them at all.

So I started playing around on CodePen and came up with a little idea to make a web app that auto generates Titles for Modern Warfare Shooters.

The finished product is here: http://www.joehart.co.uk/modernshootertitlegen/

It’s a simple program, just two arrays one of First words and one of second words. Then picks a First word and a Second Word at random then concatanates them in the form: First + “of” + Second then thwacks a random number between 1 and 5 on the end and picks a random image for the background.

I mainly did it just to play around with JS since I’m not massively familiar with it and I thought it might be mildly amusing. I might go back and rewrite it to render the cover onto a canvas element so it can actually be saved as an image but that will have to wait for another boring lecture.

Oh it’s also fully mobile ready, so try looking at it on an iPhone 5 and storing it on your home screen then launching it.

Well That Lasted Long…

Ok so my last post was about trying to get a pong game up and running in Unity, and i got reasonably far got the paddles moving and the ball physics going but then i sorta gave up because I had an idea.

I’ve finally come up with a game idea I think I can actually pull off and it’ll be quite funny. For now I’ve switched over to Java development, just because trying to learn all of the systems of unity was frustrating me so I’m going back to what I know.

This may sounds counterintuitive but with game making sometimes the less helpful the software is, the better. Like with writing the game in Java it’s an entirely blank canvas I can create exactly what I want without having to bend other systems to my will.

This is mostly good for me because I want to make this game 2D and unity just isn’t built for it. There are get arounds you can use to try and get unity to fake 3D but its a whole hassle. So I’m just gonna code it in Java.

Once I’ve got a working prototype up and running I might share what the project actually is but for now I’m gonna keep it under wraps.

Once more, with feeling

So many times I’ve thought to myself “I’m really gonna sit down and have a crack at game development”, and usually all that happens is I screw around with an API or a toolset for 50 minutes and then give up and go back to web development cause I know how to do that.

This is usually because my video game development endeavours are far too ambitious, apparently trying to make an open world RPG the scale of Skyrim is a tad out of my skill range.

So this is going to be different. I’m going to learn how to make games the way I learnt everything else I know, through practise. From little to big.

I’m going to start off with a pong clone, and then move up to a space invaders clone, then a platformer and so on and so forth. I’m not going to try to be artistic or individual because I’m not good enough. In my experience imitation comes before innovation. So lets get started.

Not much, but at least it’s something.

Currently this is the state of my pong game, 4 cubes in the game engine Unity both being controlled by the W and S keys on the keyboard.

To do:

  • Controls for player paddle completed.
  • Ball physics
  • Scoring System
  • Enemy AI
  • Pause Menu
  • Start Game menu
  • Snazz it up(optional)