GTProductions

SpringFling in Apple Stores around the country!

2010-03-12T21:18:00.001-05:00

Today I finally learned the meaning of the secretive phone call I received from Apple a few months back. Apple has put my SpringFling demo on the in-store iPod Touches that grace Apple Stores around the country. What an honor!

I've been meaning to update SpringFling and with Unity iPhone 1.6's release followed by this unexpected good fortune, it may give me the boost to get some updates pushed out.

Take a look at the pics:

Thanks again to Apple for featuring a small time indie.

February Boston Post Mortem

2010-02-12T00:06:00.006-05:00

I'm just now finding time to write up some thoughts on Tuesday's Post Mortem. What a great send-off to Yilmaz, who is returning to Turkey on February 14th. Scott Macmillan gave a great little speech about Yilmaz being sorely missed in the community. It's definitely true, and good to see how quickly both he and I were welcomed into the Boston community after moving to the area not long ago.

Seeing the 3 site's Global Game Jam games was really a great subject for a talk. Lots of interesting ideas and some great execution. Special thumbs up to the Quest for Stick group and Morgan Quirk's excellent Flixel game. Some serious talent there and at every site. I'm REALLY impressed by this years GGJ turnout.

It goes without saying that I owe a great thanks to Scott Macmillan and Darius Kazemi as well as Les and the other BPM organizers for allowing Yilmaz and I to speak at the Post Mortem and to bore the crowd with images of ramen, cats, and energy drinks. A fun time all around.

The Skellig was packed once again, and Elliott Mitchell was kind enough to send me some pictures he snapped during the event. I'd guess the turnout was in the 150 range, which is surprising for a non-sponsored talk.

I'm posting the slides here in case anyone is interested.

Cheers, and I look forward to the next one.

Super Ramen BROTHers - punny?

2010-02-10T19:17:00.001-05:00

I recently realized that a far grander title for Super Ramen BROTHers could have included a second horrifically-bad pun:

SOUPer Ramen BROTHers...

*sigh*..

RunRunRunJump

2010-02-03T13:13:00.005-05:00

Our Global Game Jam game RunRunRunJump has been deployed as a web playable version! You can play the game here:

http://gtproductions.net/projects/runrunrunjump/

Also, the theme music is now available for download :) Grab it here:

http://gtproductions.net/projects/runrunrunjump/Runrunrunjump_music.mp3

24 hour iPhone game - The Extreme Ramen Challenge

2010-01-03T22:47:00.034-05:00

Update:

Super Ramen BROTHers is on the App Store!

Get it at: http://bit.ly/superramen

======================================================

As a fun new years gift to the community, my friend Yilmaz Kiymaz and I decided to create an iPhone game. We thought it would be fun to ask the community what *they* wanted to see in a game. We also thought it would be interesting to see if we could pull off a game from start to finish in 24 hours. So we, being the crazy people that we are, thought "Sure, why not?". This is how it all began.

3:30pm [1/1/2010] - We posted the initial call for designs from the community. We set some ground rules for the 'contest', made ramen versions of ourselves (and my cat), and posted away.


[Posted by GTJuggler]
24 hour iPhone game - Extreme Ramen Challenge

We're making an iPhone game, starting at 6:30pm EST today.
The design will be based around one word: 'Absurdity'

You're the designer. Go.

Official Rules:Post directly in this thread using the example template seen in the following post.
Game concept must follow the general theme of 'absurdity'. For examples of absurd game pitches see Offroad Velociraptor Safari or Enviro-Bear 2010.
This means the idea should not be a direct photocopy of a preexisting game.
Due to the 24 hour nature, game scope (or the complexity of the game) must be limited. Please do not pitch your awesome RPG / futuristic hybrid racing MMO today.
We will be choosing an idea that has a proper mix of the following adjectives: Crazy, fun, silly, compact, horrible, ingenious, and weird.
Anyone is eligible to post their ideas
Game concept does not need to stick to a PG or G rating. Feel free to express yourself.
Attach any concept art to the post (purely optional but will increase chances... (of being made fun of for using MS Paint))

Brought to you by Alex Schwartz (GTJuggler) and Yilmaz Kiymaz (VoxelBoy), developers of iPhone games SpringFling and Rocket Monkey.

This contest is fueled by Ramen, Bawls energy drinks, and the Unity engine.

Here's a picture of the developers:

3:30pm [1/1/2010] - After the initial post, we received some cool ideas, some completely insane. Here are a few:


[quote from Spidey146]
You are a plumber trying to fix pipes, which mysteriously keep breaking, to direct some dumps which people are taking in different apartements so that they land in the ummmmm compacter, along the way there are bugs, like giant dung beetles and cockroaches, and animals like skunks and cats which try to eat the scat, so you have to make sure not to send the crap at them.


[quote by Sailor Jensen]
Game name: Super Ramen BROTHers
Short game concept: Your ramen brethren are being sold at the supermarket, like slaves. Stop the ramen packages from getting past the cashier's conveyor belt by swiping away any and all ramen that comes by. The fate of your kind is at stake.

I love this idea and name! What about if instead you are the Ramen BROTHers and you have to keep from bing scanned by jumping over food and house items being rung up, and each item rung up gets you points. If you hit an item it gets knocked off and you get knocked back a little. If you get knocked back to far you get rung up and bagged. They are seperate so you click either one to make them jump. The only way to make up for being knocked back is by collecting soy sauce packets that randomly appear coming down the conveyer. Every now and then the cats head pops up and lets you know a paw will try and swipe you soon (which you have to jump as well) The soy sauce can only be consumed by one brother so you may have to avoid it with the first so the second can get it. This would be a run and jump side view game.


[quote by sunenun]
Game name: Go Go Ramen Bowl!

Short game concept: You are an ingenius chef for a new crazy Ramen restaurant. But the restaurant is in such a cramped, compact space you must find ingredients in the weird field next door! Grab fun food ingredients before the timer runs out! Put them in your ramen but make sure each ingredient has something in common with the one you just put in. Your patrons will love your silly recipes. Shoes? Tennis balls? Whales? Sure! But careful! The wrong sequence makes your meal taste horrible.

Design notes: Top view, touch based input. Two phase game. First phase you appear in a field with icons and obstacles viewable on the landscape. Swipe in any direction to run along picking up ingredients. In the second phase you have all collected ingredients available. There is a starter ingredient listed. Pick the ingredients so that the next ingredient matches color, number, or type of the previous ingredient. For example, a "Fish Ramen!" might start with Fish, add in a Blue Whale (both swim in the ocean), then a Blue Sweater, then a pair of Mittens, then a Kitten (rhymes).

6:30pm [1/1/2010] - We decided to go with Sailor Jensen's game about Ramen Brothers (an extension of our example game idea), due to many factors. The idea fit the 'absurd' theme, scope was low enough that we believed we could pull it off in under 24 hours, and the art asset list that the game demanded was somewhat reasonable compared to the other ideas. Also it had no IP restrictions or other features which would prevent it from being App Store material. We chose the idea and posted a second major update.


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Thanks for the entries! We have chosen an idea (an amalgamation of Sailor Jensen's ideas and the conveyor belt part from the sample idea).

Here is our game design:
You and your brother (Super Ramen BROTHers) are running on the treadmill-like surface of the cashier's conveyor belt, trying to avoid getting scanned. Camera view is 3rd person. You have to either jump or avoid oncoming food items. If you are hit, you get knocked back a notch, closer to the scanner and your eventual doom. If you happen to gather a soy sauce packet, you get moved forward a notch. There are 3 lanes and the characters can move from lane to lane with a simple lateral swipe. Jumps are executed with a vertical swipe.

Suggestions, changes, additions, comments, and angry remarks are all welcome. Well, it's time to get coding!

9:05pm [1/1/2010] - When our first of many development updates was ready, we promptly posted. Note that this first development update mentions a special guest artist, Fluxist8070. This is Matt Board, local Boston indie, gamer, 3d art teacher, and all around great guy. I contacted him at 8pm, fully aware that asking him if he wanted to do a marathon art session was both absurd and showed a frightening lack of preparation. Amazingly, he accepted and was ecstatic about the idea. To quote Matt, after making the call to action via email, "Heck Yeah! Let me know what you need and you can consider it made!". How about that! Here's the first development update:


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Development Update 1
================
* Our special guest artist (Fluxist8070) is hard at work on a character model (ramen package)
* Yilmaz is building the code base. We have objects spawning randomly and moving on a conveyor belt (aka a grey box moving on a grey plane). Whee
* Alex is working on a main menu. Screenshot below:



As always, suggestions are more than welcome. They are required.... at gun point.

12:01am [1/2/2010] - January 2nd has reared its ugly head and we're deep into development. A forum member has a 1-line suggestion:

[Quote by TouchChatterbox]
Mortal Kombat with Toasty.

We decide this is a great idea so we begin thinking about a way to include a MK-style "Toasty" effect in our game.

1:48am [1/2/2010] - Things are coming along and we post the second 2nd development update, this time with a video.


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Development Update 2
=================
We have a HUD design (see below)
Character design is complete (see below)
Animations partially done
Gameplay 40% complete code-wise






Gameplay WIP Video 1
http://gtproductions.net/projects/24houriPhone/prototype_v1.mov

1:57am [1/2/2010] - Responses from the community have so far been positive, but once we started the development updates, people were really getting excited. Posts like this one by Negamaki really kept us going through the night:

[quote by Negamaki]
Wow, you weren't clowning around! It's great to see the idea coming together so nicely already! YOU CAN DO IT!!!

2:33am [1/2/2010] - We decide to ignore some other community comments, such as this one:

[quote by TouchChatterbox]
What about some near-tentacle porn only to reveal the breasts belong to a Japanese businessman drunkeningly singing karaoke in the supermarket with ramen noodles on his head? That would be a good pre menu animation! :-p

4:20am [1/2/2010] - Matt Board comes back with a sweet ramen character model with animations (around 3am) and we implement the animations. Our third development update is as follows:


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Development Update 3
================

We have the character in and animating!

Video:
http://gtproductions.net/projects/24houriPhone/prototype_v2.mov

10:26am [1/2/2010] - Our next update occurs as the morning light shines in our bloodshot eyes. Beth Beinke returns from work (night shift) and makes two props for our conveyor belt. Thanks to Beth for her help with the art! Development update 4 covers the new working menu system, with a two-second shot of the game screen. Things are starting to get interesting and reality hits hard with only 8 hours to go.


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Development Update 4
================

We're getting quite sleepy. With 8 hours left, we feel about as tired as Link, the cat.



The energy drinks are starting to lose effect and morale is drowning in thoughts of warm blankets and naps. But we have a third video, now showing the final menu. Yes, we'll have online high score boards using AGON. Check it out.

Prototype video 3 - Menus
http://gtproductions.net/projects/24...ototype_v3.mov

Edit: Let me know if anyone else has problems with these quicktime files.

12:26pm [1/2/2010] - Suggestions on new game ideas and new game modes continue to stream in long after it is plausible for implementation. We don't crush their souls by shooting them down. Instead we let them stream in and stick to our plan, drafted only 18 hours before. Development update 5 brings a screenshot of the near-final game scene and updates on music/other items.


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Development Update 5
===============
An old band member of Matt's has volunteered to do music. Six hours left!
Dual player movement is working sans touchscreen input
Splash screen + icon are being rendered/painted
We have 9 grocery store items for the conveyer belt. This will probably be the final amount for the 24 hour game, as the art asset creation is becoming too time consuming

Also, a quick screenshot showing the hud in place:



The aisle eleven symbol in the hud also doubles as a pause symbol.

4:06pm [1/2/2010] - Music by a friend of Matt's is completed (once again, with no forewarning another friend of a friend happens to produce amazing stuff for us in no time flat. Awesome.)


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Development Update 6
==============

Music by Steve Trenkamp is complete. Amazing work by Steve. Can't thank him enough.

http://gtproductions.net/projects/24...hone/music.mp3

4:28pm [1/2/2010] - Two frikkin hours left. Matt comes back with more quality outsourced art. He has made the splash screen.


[Posted by GTJuggler]
Developer Update 7
===============
Splash screen
MK 'Toastie' cat added
First on-device test! 
Touch input WIP

Splash screen looking hawt:

4:53pm [1/2/2010] - More awesome comments are posted, and our morale is boosted for the final hurrah.

[Posted by various]

All hail the new best TA ramen game in the App Store!
--
Man.. If only I could produce high quality apps in a day. :/
--
As long as it has "toasty", this will be the best game ever.
--
Now if apple will approve it with in 24 hours. heh
--
Wow, only about an hour left! Can't wait to see the results! Please make a YouTube video showing us the finished game!

6:30pm [1/2/2010] - We are there, 24 hours and 1 minute since the post declaring our chosen design. We post our results:

[Posted by GTJuggler]
We haven't added titles/credits or anything fancy to the video. It's just straight video capture of the game.

Also, here are 3 pictures of the game on the device:








And the video! Woot.

http://gtproductions.net/projects/24houriPhone/final_video_capture.mov
http://vimeo.com/8506224

We want to thank everyone involved and say that this was truly a fun experience (albeit tiring and sleepless :P). Maybe we can try it again some time.

-Alex and Yilmaz

I want to reiterate the credits page to point out the awesome help Yilmaz and I had.

Well, that's the end of our story. Submission to the App Store is slated for Jan 4th (not officially part of the development process, so we can get away with putting that off for a little so we can rest). I ended up sleeping for 21 hour straight after this, but as for the question 'Was it worth it?'

Hell yes.

SpringFling 1.1 update released

2009-12-28T22:23:00.008-05:00

Today Apple approved the SpringFling v1.1 point release which fixes numerous bugs, adds 9 new clothing items for Mr. Spring, and adds a new powerup: Ass-saving fans. They'll seriously save your ass. That is all.

Ways to get rejected by Apple - App Store Tips

2009-12-12T13:35:00.022-05:00

So you've got 'the next best thing', that killer game that will no doubt rock the socks off the App Store and make you an instant millionaire. Mhmm. Before you submit to the App Store, take a look at some common ways to set off Apple's sirens and get you slapped on the hand and sent to the back of the line to wallow with the other dejected folk. This list focuses on game development specifics, as opposed to app development. Listed in no particular order:

1.) Matching high resolution icon
Having a matching 57x57 and 512x512 icon is key. The small icon is used on the device while the larger version is used in iTunes. The important part is that the large and small icons required for submission must be visually equivalent. Just because the bigger version is, well, bigger, doesn't mean you can or should cram a bunch of extra visual elements into your design. Additionally, the new December '09 iTunes redesign puts your high resolution icon front and center in iTunes so developers out there who were simply scaling up their 57x57 bitmap icon to 512x512 to satisfy the requirement are no longer going to get away with this. I recommend building your app icon in a vector-based drawing app (Illustrator) to allow for easy size changes later on. Think ahead to advertisements, banners, website backgrounds... You don't want to be limited by your small icon size.

2.) Vibrate function on iPod Touch
Are you calling the vibrate function without first checking the model of the device that is running your game? The iPod Touch does not have the hardware to vibrate and according to Apple, an uncaught call to the vibration function on an iPod Touch is not allowed and is grounds for rejection. Other users have noted that Apple's official SDK documentation states that vibration can ONLY be used for alerts but this one seems to be intentionally ignored for games.

3.) Camera access on iPod Touch
Same as #2. Calling a function that is available only on a subsection of the iDevices is grounds for removal. GPS applies here as well (1g iPhone and iPod Touch devices do not have GPS capability). It has been said that it is not enough to just inform the user by alerting "You can not use this function on an iPod" when the user taps the camera button, for example. The button should never be displayed. Note that this is not the same as graying out the button. (See #12)

4.) Network lobbies and WWW calls
If your game has any type of networking in it, be careful of specific panes, modes, pages, and areas that are designated to be for online networked use only. If you have a game lobby where online game matching occurs, the user should not be able to reach this area if there is no internet connection. A popup dialog should inform the user that they are not connected to a valid network connection. Checking for an internet connection can be tricky due to the fact that the Apple provided 'Reachability' sample project is said to be suboptimal for connectivity checks. Refer to this url for more information on this. If you're using Unity iPhone, you're in luck! "iPhoneSettings.internetReachability" returns a bool that properly describes your current internet reachability.

5.) Pictures of an iPhone on your iPhone
Imagery depicting an iPhone or iPod Touch will get you a swift rejection from Apple. Apple cites these cases as copyright concerns and while sometimes valid, this can be very frustrating for designers wanting to explain a process to the end user. Take for example a racing game in which the tutorial shows the user how to control the vehicle. "Place both hands on either side of the iPhone, home button facing you and pointing toward the right, and rotate clockwise or counterclockwise to simulate a steering wheel turning action". The simpler method would be to show an image but Apple doesn't take kindly to this. Note that some lucky developers have gotten away with this but with every app update comes another review process and another chance for rejection.

6.) Defamatory imagery of famous people
Apple rejects images that defame famous people. I'd love to see a tabloid try to get through the review process. Good luck. Extra warning for those creating a political app. Some have noted rejection due to political caricatures.

7.) Simulating failures
If your million dollar app involves a broken/cracked screen joke, bluescreen, kernel panic, or other simulated hardware or software failure, think again. If it will make a little girl cry because she thinks her iPhone is broken, it probably won't get through the approval process.

8.) Use of Private APIs
I'll admit I'm not the most knowledgeable on the subject of private API use but I can provide some layman's interpretation of this common issue. Apple provides but does not document some functions that even they themselves use. These functions may change at any time so since they may be unstable, untested, and not guaranteed to stick around, Apple is rejecting games or apps with these calls via an automatic detection process. Recently, Apple has been providing warning emails instead of a full out rejection, which I think is a really wonderful idea. It cuts down on the number of reviews their team has to do and helps make the developers lives a bit better by avoiding a resubmission.

9.) Egregious network activity
Some developers have noted a rejection based on bandwidth usage. A rule of thumb is that a game or app should never exceed 4.5mb of data per 5 minutes of activity. I would imaging AT&T's GPS app, which downloads all map data in real time, exceeds this limit but developers should nonetheless monitor traffic to see if they're getting near this critical bandwidth limit.

10.) Localized text in images
This is a tough one. In order to properly support localization, you should keep all images free of localized text. If you only care about sales in one region, go for it, but this seems to be an increasingly bad idea.

11.) Pricing text in description or images
Keep your description free of dollar amounts. Each app store uses different currencies so referencing price in dollar amounts will not help your case. Once again, this is rampant in descriptions (Big Sale! Only 99c!) but if your target audience is not US, you might want to think twice about that.

12.) Limited functionality
This can mean a multitude of things. An app can be tagged as having 'limited functionality' if it has no apparent goal, feature, or purpose. Limited functionality also refers to crippling an app and re-releasing it as a lite or demo version. This is a commonly disputed and nebulous idea. What can and can't be done in a lite version of a game? Well the answer is still not very defined but Apple will tell you that a Lite app cannot appear to be crippled. For example, visually disabled buttons or sections of the app are not allowed. Apple will also state that you cannot prompt the user to upgrade to the full version and you cannot display the price of the full version inside the lite app. Now you may be thinking 'But I've seen many apps that do exactly what you're telling me not to do!' and you would be correct. Many, many apps have broken this rule time and time again while others continue to be rejected for it. Since the lite version debacle is still a moving target, my only advice is to make a lite version and hope it is approved. If not, follow their specific instructions on how to fix it up for the next go.

13.) Fatal bugs
This seems like a no-brainer but you need to fully test your app on all devices in all situations. Since this isn't always feasible, do the best you can to avoid bugs and focus on crashing bugs since a crash on launch on any of the *supported* devices means an instant rejection.

14.) Handling user data
If you collect user information and the data is sent over a network, you need to explain to the user what will happen to their data and give them an option to opt out. For example, leaderboards require certain notification to the user that even their bogus name used on the high score boards will be sent over the internet and seen by others.

15.) Misuse of Apple's UI elements
Users know how the iPhone's UI is supposed to work and have been trained by Apple’s built-in apps. If you use a button image or a UI metaphor in an unconventional way, users will become confused and Apple may reject you for it.

Closing thoughts:
A post on MobileCrunch yesterday surmises that the App Store rules are becoming a bit more lax, moving forward. We'll see how this goes, but for now, it's best to err on the side of caution and obey the rules to avoid longer wait times and the disappointment of App Store rejection.

Are there more that I've missed? Leave a comment.

iPhone game development talk at Apple Store

2009-11-28T22:42:00.008-05:00

For those interested in learning about game development on the iPhone, I'll be giving a talk next week at the Boylston St. Apple Store. This talk will be focused specifically on the use of the Unity engine to create iPhone games. The presentation will cover the prerequisites of iPhone development, the Unity interface, code examples, and a showcasing / postmortem of my completed iPhone game SpringFling. The event details are as follows:

Date: December 2nd
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Boylston St. Apple Store, 3rd Floor

Come with questions. No laptop necessary as this will not be a development workshop.

Edit: Apple posted a blurb on Apple.com/boylstonstreet

SpringFling v1 out, v2 in the works

2009-11-07T05:18:00.007-05:00

So, for those of you who follow the blog but weren't aware, SpringFling is now on the App Store! (Game website and iTunes Link)

Publicity has been going well. Check out these positive reviews/previews!

Cool beans.

On another note, before release, I was aware of a couple of outstanding bugs and thanks to players, have filled in the gaps to find the rest of the noticeable bugs. I'll be working to resolve these throughout the week and hopefully submit v2 some time in the near future.

One such bug revolves around general inconsistencies with AGON, scoring, achievements, and reliability of getting these awards. Here's the bug and the fix:

Issues with AGON and things not registering:

Issues occur when the user launches the game for the first time, plays some levels, then finally decides to launch the scoreboards. Then they are prompted to make a username but at this point, actions they had taken previously are discounted, allowing the user to get to a point where the local playerprefs file believes a certain achievement is gotten but is not gotten as far as AGON is concerned. Short term solution is to reset progress from within the game. v2 fix adds a login screen when launching the game, ensuring all players are able to register their scores/achievements properly. This does NOT mean you have to approve online scores, but you do need a username to be able to store your local high scores.

Status: Fixed

SpringFling Submitted!

2009-10-21T01:38:00.002-04:00

Hey everyone. This will be the final update before the all-important release of SpringFling on the App Store. The big news is that:

SpringFling v1 has been submitted to Apple for review!

This means that the world can get high flying springy action in 1-2 weeks, hopefully before the end of October.

Since you last heard, SpringFling has had a large amount of final polish added, including a full character customization suite that allows you to equip silly hats, beards, and glasses on the character. Some other things have been taken care of, such as a full fledged interactive tutorial, finalized level art, finalized custom soundtrack, framerate improved after some significant code optimization, and many many bug fixes. Thanks to my testers for helping make the game as solid as a v1 release can be :)

Since I'm speaking to a good amount of game devs here, I'll mention that working with Unity iPhone was a breeze and I'm glad I chose to use the Unity engine to develop the game instead of attempting to roll my own solution. To be honest, I don't have the programming skills to hack my own engine, and if you happen to, I can only say to shoot for the stars, but developing an engine incurs a significant overhead of time and therefore money that some would rather not deal with. Buying an engine also costs money but I have only good things to say about my development experience. Take away from that what you will.

Follow SpringFling updates on Twitter for updates from Mr. Spring
@springflinggame (twitter.com/springflinggame)

SpringFling - Website + Trailer

2009-09-18T00:05:00.005-04:00

That's right folks, a real video trailer for SpringFling has been released. In addition, the app website is up and running! It's been a long week at my full time job and a long week working on the video and website but it's finally paying off to see it go live.

Check out the site at SpringFlingGame.com and look below for the new trailer. Let me know what you think!

And as always, the link to the HQ Quicktime Trailer.

SpringFling - Sewer w/ audio

2009-09-12T17:15:00.007-04:00

So here's the new sewer level and accompanying musical score courtesy of Brad Scoville and Josh Dick. Any suggestions as far as art/musical stylings?

Sewer Audio

SpringFling - Parachutes in action

2009-09-09T22:56:00.011-04:00

Well it's been a few days since the last update, so I thought I'd show some new goodies. I've been hard at work on the backend for achievements, online scoring, and other various implementations and fixes, but there's also some eye candy to show.

First up, there's a new powerup in action. The parachute!

This allows for much needed in-air influence over the spring at certain critical times, such as when your jetpack runs out of juice and you're stranded over a pit of doom. Boom, parachute. Now you're like frikkin James Bond, floating back down smoothly, the ladies eyeing your shiny metallic finish. Smoooooth.

Also, I have the art created for my next powerup, the jetpack/rocket. Things are coming along nicely. :D

Tutorials - Instructing the User

2009-08-24T00:27:00.014-04:00

While building the tutorial level for SpringFling, I started thinking about how different games choose to teach the user the basic mechanics of a game. I'm not talking about a beginning cutscene that sets up the backstory or character development, but the presentation of the controls and navigation through the game world. Some games choose to present the user with a linear sequence of static screens that present text instructions, possibly with visual diagrams to assist in comprehension. This seems all well and good but if one thing's for sure, it's that users rarely read text that is presented to them, especially if it stands in the way of completing a goal or getting to the 'interesting' part of something. Users end up skimming or blindly skipping through instructions, with a higher chance of doing so if the instructions last for more than three pages. Also, some instructions go so far past the Powerpoint 8x8 rule (8 bullets per slide, 8 words per bullet) that a wall of text is thrown at the user, forcing them to bear through the reading or skip ahead and hope they don't get stuck.

For this reason I chose to do things a bit differently for the tutorial level of SpringFling. The plan is to create an interactive tutorial where the player never loses input control and is presented with both snippets of information (tips) and direct instruction (tasks). For example, the first step will be to instruct the user how to move their finger on the screen to compress the spring and aim in the proper direction to land in a certain designated destination. The level will then allow the player to try as many times as necessary to complete this task and upon completion, display positive feedback of the task completion and move onto the next task. This can be easily accomplished by using trigger volumes to detect the spring's location and whether the user has completed the task. This interactive tutorial idea isn't exactly new but especially on the iPhone, I've seen far too many games present game mechanics in a less than optimal way or in no way at all.

One other requirement is to be able to revisit the instructions or tutorial at any time without having to restart your game progress completely. Keeping this in mind, the tutorial level in SpringFling will be easily available from the level select menu in case the player wishes to run through it a second time to refresh their memory or remember how to, for example, apply jetpack boost to the player. The tutorial will be exitable at all times and quick to complete for someone well versed in the game, but with enough depth to properly show a beginner player how to navigate the game properly.

I'm always interested by games that present information in the game world without having to use a UI element or HUD element to display the information. An example of this is Rolando's unique 'hey finger' method of addressing the user, without completely breaking the fourth wall and staying in character. You Have To Burn The Rope also displays its hilariously obvious game information on the ground and walls as you walk through the initial stages of the game. Many other games use the signpost method of showing information, although that usually triggers a UI popup to properly display the text without losing legibility by presenting it solely on a 3d sign. Edge for the iPhone also uses the very intuitive method of showing a phantom cube playing out a looping action to show the player the intended path or move to complete. It seems that in-game tutorials have really picked up in the recent past as developers realize the multitude of options that are available from interactively educating the player. (Thanks to Josh Dick for helping to come up with these examples.)

Mike Minotti seems to disagree with all of this. In a blogpost entitled I Hate Tutorials, Mike talks about why he dislikes many aspects of tutorials. He makes some valid points that 'expert' players are sometimes treated condescendingly in tutorials, but to say that all tutorials should be skipped because he 'can figure out any control scheme in no time' doesn't mean that the rest of us wouldn't like to progress through an intelligent well-made tutorial that quickly gets across the main ideas without boring or overworking the player with unneeded drills. He goes on to say "Whatever you do, don’t make me go through a tutorial level". I agree that gamers have been burned in the past with some tutorials that take up too much of the players time or catering to the less experienced player but a viable solution would be to make the system adapt to how well you are completing the goals. This should keep players of all levels happy and what I plan on doing for the iPhone game.

What do you think about in-game tutorials and instructions? Should they be banned and burned at the stake? Should they be optional, manditory, adaptive, linear, static, or filled with silly hats? Voice your opinion.

Big SpringFling Content Update

2009-08-20T23:43:00.017-04:00

That's right. A bunch more content to whet your SpringFling appetite. I've put together 6 new screenshots, complete with new level art. Check em out below.

In addition, I have a rough video showing gameplay. I'll put together a proper trailer in the next few days, but for now you can just check out this quicktime video:
http://gtproductions.net/projects/springFling/springfling_beta4.mov

These screenshots can also be found on the Unity forums in the showcase thread. And now, without further ado, the screenshots.

Max vs Maya - The war rages on

2009-08-18T18:47:00.015-04:00

I want to mind dump my thoughts on the ever present war of Max vs Maya for general modeling, animation, and game development. Each has their plusses and minuses, and I'm going to quickly explore different key areas of each program in search for a clear winner in the fields of clarity, usability, and features.

History:
Max represents history in their Modifier Stack paradigm. Deformers, unwraps, and other modifiers can be stacked on top of each other and are easily viewable in a simple table. Maya on the other hand uses the node structure to represent dependencies and related modifiers for a certain object. The clear cut winner in my mind, as far as simplicity and user interface is Max. Just look at the screenshot. Maya's highlighted arrow doesn't even tell you where you're going to to end up when you click it. It's like a mystery wheel! Or you can brave the depths of the hypergraph to see your node graph. Eww.
Winner: Max

Material Editor:
Maya has a well laid out material editor called the Hypershade. Create a new blinn, assign some properties. It's very simple to use and you can see all of your materials at a glance. One downfall is that the default way to assign a material to an object is to middle click drag the material into the scene. This is far from the best approach. I am aware of the right click -> Assign material to selection but it should be much simpler. Another problem with Maya's material editor stems back to the original node based decision for the whole basis of the program. In order to, for example, delete a file node that is linked in your bump channel, you cannot just hit delete or unassign a texture. It seems that the quickest way is to go into the hypergraph view and delete the actual file node that was created when you assigned a texture to that slot. Messy. On the other hand, Max's material editor uses a confusing slot system that to me seems counterintuitive. When I look at a material editor, I feel like I should be able to see all of the materials in a list. Max instead chooses to represent materials on arbitrary material slot nodes, so if you see 4 textured preview spheres, it does not mean that there are 4 materials in the scene, but that you have created pointers to four existing materials and there may be more or less. You can even clear out all of the material slots and then are forced to use the eyedropper tool to load a material into the slot. Horrible.
Winner: Maya

Interface:
Both Max and Maya have highly customizable interfaces with great context sensitive radial right click menus (or quad menus as Max calls them and marking menus as Maya calls them), customizable top menus, toolbars, custom actions or script buttons, etc etc. Both have more than adequate modeling tools, especially with Max2010's graphite modeling suite, there's a plethora of modeling tools available to use for any task. Max still hasn't moved from the separate Editable Mesh / Editable Poly paradigm, which i feel is a weakness from a scripting and usability standpoint. At some point you need to ditch the backwards compatibility and put the best tools into one combined mesh interface. Max fails miserably at alphabetizing their modifier list, and that list has gotten WAY too long to keep in a linear pulldown menu. Shame on you Max. Then again, Maya's interface looks like a bad Java app or a linux GUI... so there's not much beauty to go around in this fight.

Winner: Tie

Scripting:
Despite what pretty much everyone else says, Maxscript seems equally as powerful as Mel so far, as I haven't come across many things you can't do in Maxscript, yet. That yet is a pretty big yet, and as time goes on and I develop more and more Maxscripts, I might need to revisit this section, possibly with a deep hatred for Maxscript. One thing to point out is that all of Maya's commands are completely written in MEL and are available to browse, so ANYTHING can be scripted in Maya. Plus the addition of Python seems pretty huge for both Max and Maya, so there's also no clear winner in this category.
Winner: Tie

Other:
Maya is cross platform. This is a huge plus for Maya that pretty much pushes it into the 'extreme win' category for me and thousands of other Linux and Mac users. Even though Autodesk owns both, I can say with reasonable confidence that Max will NEVER be ported to any other platforms. Also, the community is huge for both Max and Maya, and fanboys will continue to strangle each other over their favorite DCC app. One thing I would love to see to unify Max and Maya (come on Autodesk!) would be to help ease the pain of switching between Maya and Max. This could be helped by combining the documentation in a way that search terms for one app's features will show up in the equivalent function of the other app. For example, a search for merge vertices will bring you to the editable poly/mesh docs for Max and show you the Max equivalent weld verts command. This type of guide already exists for Maxscript/MEL, located here.

Final Verdict:

Use whichever one you are more comfortable. Hey, they both import silently into Unity, so what's not to love? It's not worth the pain of switching just because your friend thinks the other app is better. If you join a company that is strictly Max and you're a Maya person, take the time to learn the other app. It's not that bad, really. Or if you want to avoid the Autodesk monolith, just use Softimage's XSI... oh wait. *Sad*

Thoughts?
So I'm not exactly the authority on either Maya or Max, so feel free to share your opinions in the comments section. Also, you may have noticed that I didn't weigh in on UV tools, the quality of the individual modeling tools, and many other aspects of each program, either due to laziness or a lack of in-depth familiarity with that aspect. Weigh in!

SpringFling - Menus and Updates

2009-08-16T22:54:00.011-04:00

Here's the menu I've come up with for SpringFling. I'm using simple planes and lerps to do all of the animation. The spring's eye movement and sun movement is all programmatic. I initially tried animating nodes in Maya but the performance hit was a bit too much for the iPhone.

As you can see from the credits screen, my good friends Josh and Brad will be composing *custom* music for the entire game! This should really add to the professionalism and quality of the overall product.

In addition, you can see that player progress is being properly tracked, as seen by the locking status in the level select menu. This is accomplished through the PlayerPrefs functionality in Unity. They make it extremely simple to save data to the phone/computer by using the following code:


//Once a level has been completed, store the level
PlayerPrefs.SetInt("Level", 2);

//Retrieve the current level
PlayerPrefs.GetInt("Level");

Anywho, check out the video of the menu system in action. Any suggestions?

And of course the Quicktime version: Menu video

SpringFling - Main Menu UI Mockup

2009-08-13T01:08:00.006-04:00

A quick mockup of the UI. Grass and sky were painted in Photoshop. I plan on having the sun come up over the gray UI element as a subtle tip of the hat to the geniuses at Popcap.

I've been using the name 'SpringFling' as one word throughout development but people frequently put the space after spring so I don't feel too bad wrapping the name on two lines in the main menu.

Wrangling GUIs with Unity iPhone

2009-08-03T21:54:00.032-04:00

Dealing with GUI creation is both a rewarding and frustrating venture. While working on my iPhone game SpringFling, I've come across some GUI conundrums. I wanted to achieve a UI effect like this:

The height bar would dynamically fill up based on the y-height of the player. It seemed simple to do, as I would just modify the scale attribute of an overlaid half transparent plane that would represent the filled portion of the bar. I could then rotate the bar slightly to match the 10 degree angle on which the ruler is set and all would be well. That doesn't quite work out as simply though. When you're working with GUI in Unity, it is a special graphics layer that is rendered last. That means that no 3d elements can ever go in front of your UI. I knew of this limitation and thought that I would just use two GUITextures and scale the red bar dynamically. Unfortunately, you are not able to rotate GUITextures so I first moved to a much more dynamic solution: Render textures. Using render textures in the Unity editor without touching a script, I was able to achieve the GUI element below:

Due to the awkward size of the video, you can also view the source .mov here:
http://gtproductions.net/projects/springFling/springfling_heightbar.mov

Behind the scenes, this progress bar consists of two planes, one with the ruler texture and height text, and a separate single poly plane positioned over the ruler. The shader is then set to additive and the scale is modified in the playerScript. The y-height of the player directly affects the scale of the red bar. The single poly plane used for the red bar needed to scale from the left side so the pivot point had to be manually moved in my DCC app (Maya) in order to get scaling to happen in the correct location. Once this setup was working, I moved it out of view of my main camera and created a second camera and pointed it at my height bar. This second camera would look at the UI setup I created out in space to the side of the main level geometry. I then created a new render texture and in the properties dialog of this second camera, I added my render texture into the 'target texture' field. Lastly I positioned my render texture near the bottom of my main camera and voila, a 3d UI overlaid on my game scene. This unfortunately is a Unity Pro-only feature so I needed to find another way to do this.

EDIT: Thanks to Dreamora and Matt for the guidance. It also seems that render textures do not actually work on iPhone hardware so this solution is wonderful for Unity Pro desktop games but for the iPhone, another solution can be used. You can accomplish the same result using two cameras and no render texture. Just set everything up as I mentioned above but instead of using the render texture, set the "Clear flags" on camera2 to 'none' so basically the background of will be transparent and camera2 will be rendered first and then the main level camera second. This allows the gui to be overlaid on top of the scene while allowing 3d geometry to come BEFORE the gui elements. This is key for any type of crazy/interactive gui in almost any game. Hey we're using this technique at work for rendering a 3d UI over a background scene.

One other thing I'm experimenting with is the use of Unity's great new GUI system known as UnityGUI vs the old tried and true method of GUITextures and GUITexts and manual UI development. Instead of event driven GUI development, UnityGUI uses an Immediate Mode GUI system, or 'IMGUI' which basically boils down to the fact that you work with the GUI in a separate GUI-specific update loop where you use logic to change GUI elements dynamically. This makes fades, slides, transforms, and other animated GUI operations much simpler and mirrors the regular Unity update loop in almost every way. Below is a basic example of a flashing button:


//flashing button example
function OnGUI () {
if (Time.time % 2 < 1) {
  if (GUI.Button (Rect (10,10,200,20), "Meet the flashing button")) {
     print ("You clicked me!");
  }
}
}

Those familiar with Unity iPhone development will note that it is not advised to use Unity's built in UnityGUI system and instead opt for GUITexts and GUITextures due to performance reasons. This is a valid concern as Unity's GUI system does have a significant overhead associated with it but it really only comes into play with HUD UIs where UI elements are rendered over a 3d scene that requires a high framerate for gameplay. In a dedicated menu scene, UnityGUI works perfectly on the iPhone but as I move forward with custom UI art, I might switch over to the old GUITexture method to save resources. The last week of development will surely be focused on performance testing so I'll be able to give more solid statistics on the impact of UnityGUI compared to single UI element placement. If you're planning on using UnityGUI on the iPhone make sure to turn of automatic layout by putting this line in your Start() or Awake() method:


useGUILayout = false;

It will reduce your GUI overhead to an almost acceptable level for iPhone use but as I mentioned before, it's not a great idea for a HUD where the game scene runs behind the UI. :)

Lastly, I stumbled across a post about iPhone optimizations and learned that string comparisons are much more expensive than int comparisons. Previously I was managing both game and GUI states with a static state string variable in my main game script. All all other scripts would query this state during the update loop ala:


if(game.state == "flying"){
//do stuff
}

This worked for me as I was able to easily see which state was being addressed by the string name, but after after hearing about the performance hit, I decided to switch over to enumeration. I also rely on a second state variable which I have named guistate to keep track of my different (for a lack of a better term) GUI states. These, for example, consist of 'mainmenu', 'highscores', 'shop', 'stats', and of course 'none'. With the ability to get and set these global states at any time from any script, I can determine where the user is in the logical flow of the game and exactly what they are doing there. Then my onGUI function contains each of my GUIs and wraps each one in a quick if statement ala:


if(guistate == aguistate.death){ //player has died
GUI.BeginGroup ( blah blah GUI creation for death screen goes here);
}

Well there you have it. And if I can leave you with some words of wisdom, GUI takes twice as long as you think it will, even if you know this fact to be true.

SpringFling - Beta gameplay video released

2009-07-23T14:01:00.004-04:00

I've been putting a bunch of time into my iPhone game and am ready to show a quick beta video of some of the new features and art that's been added so far. Check it out on Vimeo:

Yes, folks. Rocket boost, Silly hats, Googley eyes and an anthropomorphized spring dude. Leave comments!

Boston Area Game Development Meetups

2009-07-19T16:02:00.030-04:00

Calling all Boston-area game developers! Many people know and love the Boston Postmortem; a popular game developer meetup and local IGDA chapter for the Boston area. For many, the BPM is a staple industry event but some are not aware of the other meetings for devs in the area. Here's a list of some lesser known game development related meetups and hubs that feature periodic events or game dev related goodies:

Game Development

Boston Postmortem - The main monthly game developer meetup in the Boston area and local IGDA chapter. I used to drove in from Worcester every month just to attend this. It's that good. Drink some beer, network, and listen to the speaker. Good times will ensue. Also the website is a central hub info, with a job board, event board, local company listing, and industry news.

Boston Indies - A great monthly meetup put on by Scott Macmillan, previously at BetaHouse, now held at the Asgard in Cambridge. You don't need to be hardcore indie like Scott to attend, but if you're not, he might point and laugh at you. Overall, a wonderfully supportive community. Come demo some work in progress projects or just network and eat some pizza.

NE Games SIG - New England Games Special Interest Group puts on some interesting talks and industry events. Come hang with the MIT guys and gals to enjoy some networking and a great location at Microsoft's NERD building.

Dorkbot Boston / Axiom - Dorkbot is an interesting crowd of hackers, modders, artists, and code monkeys that like to experiment with all things electrical. They've done a few game development related events such as a recent talk on interactive fiction and use the Axiom Art Gallery in JP as a venue from time to time. Check out Dorkbot and Axiom for event listings.

NE Digital Artists - North East Digital Artists Group hosts events such as Z-Brush training and advanced Z-Brush workshops. Note that not everything they do is Z-Brush related! Check out their sweet site and help keep the digital artist community alive.

WPI GDC / Speaker Series - Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Game Development Club hosts both development and entertainment events from time to time during the school year. I'm not sure which other schools in the area run similar style events open to the public, but check out the club's website for details. In addition, the IMGD major at WPI hosts a speaker series throughout the school year consisting of great talks from industry members.

Boston Game Development Meetup Group - There's actually a Meetup.com group for game development that's small but interesting. They usually meet at an Au Bon Pain in Cambridge. Some cool guys.

Drinks on Tap - An iPhone developer meetup held at Jillians near Fenway every few months. Recommended for mobile folk.

Purple Blurb - An MIT series on digital writing. Looking at their previous events, they have had some interesting speakers on interactive fiction.

Expos

Boston GameLoop - Scott Macmillan and Darius Kazemi put together this 'Unconference" in both 2008 and 2009. A highly recommended and very down to earth conference for game industry folk only.

MIGS - Montreal International Game Summit is a yearly game development conference in Canada. While it's not exactly in the Boston area, it is definitely worth the hike to attend. Prices are very fair compared to GDC and the quality of sessions definitely rivals it. Highly recommended for students, industry members, and developers of all shapes and sizes.

MIT BIG - MIT's Business in Gaming is a yearly conference centered around the business of games. Even if you're not into that sort of thing, the sessions are interesting and it's worth attending. Parking is horrendous and the 2009 edition fell on the same day at IGC East, but those problems aside, it's a good one-day event.

IGC East - Although I was personally unable to attend the 2009 edition of IGC East, held in May, I heard good things about this conference and the demo night. Supposed to be accompanied by a job fair, but that fell through for the 2009 edition of IGC East.

More Gaming

East Coast PAX - Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is coming to Boston March 26th-28th. Woot.

Game Unicon - Do you find yourself going to comic/anime/game conferences only to spend the entire time in the game room and playing in the tournaments? Well check out Game Unicon in Marlborough, MA for non-stop game tournaments, prizes, and LAN'ing.

Improv Boston's Rock Band night - Check out the monthly Rock Band nights at Improv Boston in Central Square. Rock out and get judged by a panel of Harmonix employees. WPI troupe and Rock Band night regulars Crystal Math pulled off a first AND second place win this past weekend. You should attend if only to see their performances. Harmonix also does RB nights at Great Scott, a rock venue in Boston.

Am I missing anything? Did I mess up any important details? Have I deeply offended any religions? Leave a comment and let me know.

SpringFling - Pre-alpha gameplay

2009-07-13T20:37:00.017-04:00

Well, I should have posted this 3 weeks ago, but better late than never, right?

I'm currently developing an iPhone game in Unity and wanted to show a snippet of gameplay for my fans (yeah right, no one actually reads this). This video features an early snapshot of core gameplay. The basic concept is that you're a spring and your goal is simply to "Go up." The design is being fleshed out as we speak but the basics are down. There's no art, no level design, just pure prototype-y goodness. Those who attended the last Boston Indies meeting should be familiar with this, as this is what I demoed on the big screen.

More info after the jump.

SpringFling Pre-alpha Video 1 from Alex Schwartz on Vimeo.

You'll notice some substantial lag issues, but that's mostly due to the screen recording software used and the fact that there is still optimization to be done. So yeah, keep checking back for updates on this. Hopefully by the end of the week I'll be in beta :) I'm planning on putting in 3 solid hours per night for the next 7 days, if possible. Yay for medium-low scope games!

Great games - Silly designs

2009-07-13T20:20:00.008-04:00

It's no secret I'm a big fan of developers who take a chance with unorthodox designs. This brings me to my latest infatuation with Popcap's Plants vs. Zombies. I'll be the first to admit that I've only played a couple of hours of the game so far but I've also been watching my roommate play (and beat) the entire game over my shoulder for the past few weeks. The high concept is simple - Tower defense with flowers on defense and zombies on the offense. If you've never heard of the game, it sounds like it either suffers from a bad Japanese to English translation or it's plain old crazy. It turns out it's the latter and it also happens to be great fun. Addicting gameplay, great character design, and lots of replay value through minigames make this a unique departure from classic tower defense games. But seriously, take a look at the wall-nut, I dare you not to laugh.

Why is it that controlling a clumsy minotaur in a china shop while trying to retrieve tea cups for customers is so addicting? It's not just me, as you can see from Blurst.com's rising popularity. With games like Raptor Copter, Jetpack Brontosaurus, Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, and Minotaur China shop, the names and pitches are some of the strangest out there.

There's something inherently juvenile about hearing high concepts that are extremely tongue in cheek or even outright based on a pun. (SpringFling anyone?) Frequently through college, game development class assignments were to write a GDD or develop a game idea of some sort. Every time, one or more groups would come up with an idea purely based on the fact that it could get a laugh. With a reckless disregard or forethought of basic elements of gameplay, balance, playability, the team would go forward with a silly idea. Most if not all of these failed before getting too far from the starting gate. Maybe it's due to a lack of preparation or commitment but it seems both Popcap and Flashbang Studios are heavily invested in their silly ideas and can really pull off a quality game.

Blurst also has an inventive monetization scheme, but that's the subject for another post. I forsee much more popularity in the future for them, provided the ingenuity and experimental gameplay remains with each new release. I have to say, I was a bit disappointed by Flashbang's departure from crazy with Paper Moon, so hopefully we'll get some more creativity/weirdness from Flashbang in the future. Possibly more prehistoric creatures as protagonists? I won't complain.

Thoughts on the Unity engine

2009-06-19T23:10:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, some friends of mine were starting a project and were deciding on a 3D engine to develop a desktop PC game in. I tried to list out the pros and cons of the Unity engine, which would in my opinion have been a great choice for the project they were kicking off. Here is what I wrote:

I have played a part in creating three Unity games, ported one other Unity game to Unity iPhone, and am currently creating an iPhone game with it. I know that isn't 'loads' of experience and the games were medium to low scope, but here's my thoughts on it:

Pros:

Ease of Use: Unity provides easily the most seamless and anger-free development environment I've ever laid my hands on. From day one, everything made sense, and whoever designed the top down workflow must have been an engineer at Apple or something because they really nailed the interface, flow, and logic for creating games. Getting a prototype up and running is quicker in Unity than any other engine I've seen so far and that's counting GameMaker and Flash.

Physics Integration: PhysX is built in and ported for both Mac and PC so it just works. You can add rigidbodies, forces, joints, etc to objects with one or two clicks or a call from the rigidbody class though code.

Art Pipeline: Unity provides an amazing art pipeline out of the box. Drag and drop integration with maya (.mb) files (and .max files in Windows) and native FBX support give Unity a one step pipeline: If the file is in your asset folder, it is automagically imported. You can also update a 3d scene while Unity is open, tab back to Unity and it will change in real time, even while the game is playing. That's another thing; live changes. You can tweak values while the game is running by exposing variables to the editor and then changing them on the fly for very quick iteration and value shifting. It's like Firebug for game development. Web developers know the glory that is Firebug.

Networking: Unity provides built-in networking classes that ease the pain of writing your own networking code. Then again, if you're writing an MMO, you're probably going to completely tear apart their built in functions and roll your own.

Deployment: You can build to Mac (PPC, Intel, or Universal Binary), Windows, or browser-based format (or the almost never used OSX Dashboard export). This makes porting a non-issue, as everything is handled for you. There are separate builds for Wii and iPhone development but your code will largely remain the same. iPhone will cost you extra and Wii will cost you a LOT extra (they won't publically list the price).

Price: 200 bucks for an Indie license and 1500 for the Pro license. With Pro you get the ability to do post-effects, render textures, simple video playback, realtime soft and hard shadows, as well as terrain/asset streaming. You can still use projector blob shadows in Indie and code a loop to play back short videos in an image sequence, so Pro is definitely not always necessary. Indie will also throw up a little logo on the bottom for the first few seconds, so keep that in mind.

Cons:

Source code: No, you do not get full source when you purchase a Unity license. The cost of the license is pretty indicative of that fact. The thing is, you won't actually miss it. All of the coding on the developer's end is done in C# or Javascript (well, a Javascript based language called UnityScript) or even Boo script (which almost no one uses). There is a massive list of API calls and built in functions and Unity really allows you to get at every level of the engine, from simple lerps and physics functions to low level engine calls (garbage/mem management and lots more) You can write your own C++ plugins and shaderlab/CG shaders can be written for custom graphics needs (toon shading, outlines, different post processor effects, etc etc). It does come with loads of pre-made graphical effects and shaders such as line render, toon, post blur, refraction, reflection, water shaders, glass, and an assortment of combinations of parallax, bump, spec, alpha, and diffuse shaders). Most if not all of the Unity forum members will agree that you can get down and dirty without having to touch the source of the engine. It's been my experience that the cheaper engines that provide source in the regular engine price use that fact as an excuse to omit certain API calls and a sense that "Well, if the user really wants to , they can dig through this obscure section to modify it on their own". This is what I often hear about Torque, the messy unkempt source with a serious documentation lack is not really helpful to most, and having to dig through someone else's extremely low level complicated code is not always the best way to go about customizing something that should really have an easier outlet for change. Same goes for the C4 engine, in my experiences, but I don't have the C++ knowledge to be able to really get in deep in the source and truly understand the inner workings of a full fledged game engine.

Version control: Versioning is wonky unless you buy their asset server: Because of the way Unity stores its project files, there are parts that do not play well with SVN/CVS. Therefore the Unity team sells an addon called the Unity Asset Server ($500) which is a fully featured asset server that will allow better collaboration among teammates (from what I hear, I haven't had personal experience with it but I havent heard any negative comments about it, other than the fact that larger teams are pretty much forced to use it).

*Note that there would be a completely different list of pros and cons for Unity iPhone vs straight Objective-C or 2D sprite engine, but I'll save that for another day :)

Look mom, a blog!

2009-06-19T22:33:00.002-04:00

Yeah, the time has come to set up a blog for those mind dumps that require slightly more space than 140 characters. Then again, everything important can be said in 140, so I guess stay tuned for some unimportant content.