It's a first of many steps, getting my ass in gear to post on a blog so that others can watch my progress and kick me in the ass if I really start to slack off. Not going to lie, I am a terrible procrastinator. It's not that I don't want to do things, hell, I have plans up the whazoo to do lots of things and I also have the greatest intentions of doing each and every one of them. The problem with me is that when I encounter an obstacle I have the bad habit of convincing myself I'm not cut out to finish what I started and instead of trying and failing in the long run, I might as well skip all the time and effort and dive straight into the disappointment. Therefore this blog is, at least I hope, a failsafe to stop me from doing that. So, that disclaimer aside, on to the nitty-gritty.
I plan on making a video game. I've been planning on creating one for a long time but it seems like life is on a pretty good track and things are stable and secure enough to allow me to dabble. The video game industry seems to be at a perfect place for me to attempt to try right now. There are a plethora of cheap or free resources at my disposal to learn with, so I figure I might as well take advantage of them. I'll be using tools like Unity (a game engine), Blender (a modelling program), Gimp (for artsy fartsy stuff), and Blogger here to share it all with you.
I've been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how I wanted the game to look and feel. I'm drawn to the feel from Final Fantasy Tactics, an old PS game that I played countless hours on in my teens. So I hopped on Unity and made a few objects. I made the ground (green), dirt below it (brown spackle gross thing) and made a square ugly cube (the player). Looks goofy I know, but it's a good place to start.
So scripting around a bit and with the help of tutorials on the internets I got the cube to move around and I got the camera to follow. I can also pitch the cube off the edge of the ground to its death which brought me a couple giggles and a few, "Hey! Bizz! Look at 'dis! .... Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!". I don't think Bizz was as excited as I was but that no biggy, I had fun.
So after some dinking around I wanted to be able to move the camera so that it's no longer following, but if I were to press a button (say "Q"), it would move the camera 90 degrees to the left and view the cube and follow it from that angle. Well... After hours and hours of scouring the internets for its wisdom I wasn't able to find anything. I'm sure in a few months I'll look back at this and be like, "Durr... It was sooo simple...", but at this moment it's all Greek to me, man!
So I tossed the question up in the Unity forums asking for some C# web wizard to shed some light. Hopefully soon I'll be able to share my findings, but until then that's all for today. Thanks! And until next time,
-Keeves out-
That's fantastic, Dan! Way to go.
ReplyDeleteNow for the grammar police portion of my comment: You are an excellent procrastinator, not a terrible procrastinator. You want to become a terrible procrastinator. I think you do that by finding your passion. Maybe this is it. It's certainly a good start. I'm proud of you. Can't wait to not play your finished game and to boast about it (the game, not the not playing it myself) to everyone I know.