Game Time

I love computer games.  I have been playing them since I was able to use a computer.  I can’t say I am an avid gamer, I really don’t have the time for that, but I sure enjoy playing them.

One game I play often, and usually with my sons, is Minecraft.  A sandbox adventure game which we have found very fun.  We have spent countless hours building different things, going on adventures and PvP fighting.

On a cold night in November I started digging in to MinecraftForge.  A modding system for Minecraft.  In short time my oldest son and I created two ‘Mods’ for Minecraft: Stonecraft and GrackMod.

I really enjoyed manipulating the game play.  I found it very satisfying to interact with items we added to the game.  Play with rules we developed.  It was just cool.

A month or so prior to this a friend of mine introduced me to Unity3d.  A game development environment which allows you to release 2D and 3D games to many different platforms. And you can do all your scripting in C#!  JavaScript I believe is the other scripting language available.

Acting on the bug which bit me writing the Minecraft mods I downloaded Unity3d and started playing around.  Quickly I figured out this stuff is pretty complex, there is simply a lot to it.  Off to the tutorials!

The first tutorial I found was a top-down shooter game called, Space Shooter.  You fly a simple spaceship and shoot asteroids flying toward you.  It’s a basic 3d game which covers many of the very basics of building a game in Unity3d. My version can be found here.

Of course I couldn’t leave the tutorial as is.  Once built I added a high score, increasing difficulty with more asteroids and faster asteroids.  The overall experience was good and I want more!

Since I can’t draw for shit, and am not very creative with design tools, I plan to stick to the 2d world of gaming.  Modeling 3d objects just scares me.  So you may ask, where do you plan to get content?  Well, two main sources, first, is my son who is a better artist than he realizes and second I will end up buying available content.  I have found some decent stuff already (links needed) and I assume I can find someone to create some stuff form me.

Next on the list is to build a tower defense game.  I found at least one tutorial to build one.  It’s not 2d but  I am hoping it will provide more depth into maintaining more cloned prefabs, controlling their paths and player’s placing items.  Hey, who doesn’t like tower defense games?

See one of my ultimate goals is to build a SimTower type game.  A game I really enjoyed in the past, which doesn’t work on most new hardware (though I do still run it in an XP VM on my Win8.1 box!).  Can I improve on the game?  I have no idea, but I am going to build my version and see how it goes.  I don’t plan to get caught up in cloning the old game, I just want to take it a step (feature) at a time and see where it goes.  I think it will be a lot of really-frustrating fun to build.  The whole reason I build things in the first place.  What fun would it be if it was simple?  It would be boring and be lame.

I’ll update progress as I continue tutorials and build new stuff.  I plan to keep all of it available in GitHub so others may use it for examples or whatever.