dev-process
45 posts
One of Unity’s dirty secrets is that (out of the box) it’s plain awful as a prototyping tool. You can fix that, but it requires quite a lot of work. I’m going to start publishing my fixes one by one. Here’s the first: a test-bed for making custom meshes.
Slides from my talk last night at Unity Brighton. Three parts: First: introduction / overview of Entity Systems, and why you care (as a “person who makes games”) Second: Progress so far: screenshots of the Unity Editor with explanation of the new features I’ve added Third: Challenges and solutions I’ve […]
Background Every Saturday, thousands of indie / hobbyist game developers publish screenshots of their in-progress games. Unlike most forms of marketing, this is: honest / genuinely representative (it’s actual content) interesting (show’s the dev’s intentions) exciting (pictures of games are usually more fun than words) i.e. … it’s an amazing […]
Entity Systems in Unity… some examples of the problems This is a new series of blog posts, where I’m going to document specific ways + concrete examples in which Unity fails (sometimes spectacularly) as an “ECS” game engine. I like Unity; but the core architecture (which is very old) is […]
Ask 10 game developers if you should use more script code or less, and you will get 11 different answers. They are all correct: it’s very situation-specific. Use of scripting languages is highly dependent on the humans and the practical / project-management issues. Why?
Inspired by Markus / @notch, and how he got MineCraft going in the early days, I’m live-prototyping a game idea I’ve been thinking about for ages. It’s about exploring a landscape … where cities affect dungeons, and dungeons affect cities. (this is stress-relief for me, an “evenings and weekends” project. […]
In 2014, I’ll be making a new game in Unity that makes intensive use of an Entity System. This will give me lots of ammo for a new post exploring the pros and cons of Unity’s “partial” Entity System architecture. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the last […]
I maintain a medium-sized open-source project. I welcome bugs and ideas via GitHub’s excellent “Issues” tab. Some Issues are well-written, others are not. Strangely: Issues get resolved fastest are often the shortest – as little as 2 or 3 sentences. Doing it “right” is easier than I expected…
How slow is making iPhone apps using native code? You have to write HTML5, right, if you want FAST app development on iPhone? Or Unity? Or cocos2d? Right? Or … write it in Objective-C … a beginner-friendly “native” language: 2 hrs and 15 mins to create the artwork, design the […]
I haven’t shipped anything with Unity; last time I used it was early in 2.x, and it was painful enough that I never used it in a live project. I’ve re-eval’d every 6 months or so. Now I’m onto Unity 3.5, and using it in several real projects that are […]
(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here) Major changes: Enemies have health, and can be killed by touching them Performance is another 30% faster (should be running OK on most phones now?) Enemies have a direction indicator (not necessary right now, but it’ll become important […]
Spotted this (the notion “DevOps”) courtesy of Matthew Weigel, a term I’d fortunately missed-out on. It seems to come down to: Software Developers (programmers who write apps that a company sells) and Ops people (sysadmins who manage servers) don’t talk enough and don’t respect each other; this cause problems when […]
Google keeps improving Android. Android version 2.2 is one of the most important releases ever – it speeds up the whole phone (every game, every app, runs noticeably faster), along with bugfixes and new features. Sony Ericsson has caused much hate among consumers by shipping their flagship phones with OS […]
UPDATE: updated August 2011, with more detailed / idiot-proof instructions – and a couple of shortcuts. NB: when you’ve done this install once, and checked the relevant bits into your Source Control, it becomes *very* fast/easy to re-install – it’s only long-winded the first time. I thought I’d blogged this […]
If your startup sells stuff via the internet (you have an online product, service, web-app, etc), this may be the single most important thing to get right (assuming your core idea, team, etc has inherent merit). And yet so many companies spend so much money doing it so wrong. Why […]
From the IGN walkthrough: “If you have trouble grabbing the beam, just keep trying—we promise it works, but lots of readers have told us it’s not always easy.” I’m a pretty good AC player, but after 10 minutes of trying to do that one standing jump, I gave up and […]
In a few months time, I’ll be in Austin, TX, sitting on a panel at SXSW … judging people’s ideas for new computer games. I’m going to make an offer here, now, to help people entering future competitions (FYI: it’s too late for SXSW 2010). This is the fourth time […]
The problem It’s a great piece of openness to put your bug lists in the public domain. It makes it easier for your customers and partners to make decisions that save you time because they can see what’s coming and when (and save you money in reduced support requests). It […]
Slides for our panel arehere: “Killing mmo tech sacred cows.pdf”. Final panel was myself (moderating) and speakers: Bill Dalton (Bioware), Rick Lambright (Gazillion), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Marty Poulin (Shady Logic). PLEASE NOTE: WE DON’T REALLY ADVOCATE EXTREMIST RESPONSES TO TECHNICAL QUESTIONS; THIS WAS JUST A BIT OF FUN. (Mostly).