This is
the production Blog for my TOE game. TOE is an acronym for something that I’m
not quite ready to reveal yet. That being said I have been wanting to make this
game since at least 2009. I am literally doing everything on this project. Art,
Design and Code. (Yeah it isn’t correct to capitalize those words but I did it
for emphasis. Also if you want to read a blog without spelling or grammar
errors you should probably look elsewhere.)
A
journey of a thousand miles BLAH BLAH BLAH! I am not a programmer and that is
fine. I have some rudimentary coding skills. I can make a program that will find
every prime number between one and any specified large number. I fooled around
with project euler and solved some of the problems on the front page in C++. At
my best I am a Software Engineer in my sophomore year of college. (If this
means nothing to you the take away is that I’m not very good at telling
computers what to do but I might be better than you.)
I can
kind of program, and currently that is enough. Right now I am making the whole
thing in Unity. I have a 2D character in a 3D space who can move and jump and teleport
in the Z direction. This took me a week to do. I know that to some people who
don’t work on video games or various other creative endeavors this might seem
like a long time but I assure you that this is amazing. Unity is stupid easy. Oh
and there are slopes! I have a 2D platform game with slopes! If that is not
impressive then you don’t understand the work required to use a raycast to tell
the player cube to move up an incline.
I can
actually draw. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the game as it is now. The
entire affair is currently represented by 3D cubes and rectangles of varying
colors rendered orthographically so what is the point? Making the art at this
point would be pointless as so much is subject to change at the beginning of
the project. The control needs to be hammered out first. Then getting the code
to fall in line. The game looking great and playing poorly is a sure fire recipe
for failure.
I am a Game Designer. I have been a
Level Designer on various game for the past ten years. If I told you the names
then you would probably stop reading this right now. When making a game and the
player specifically you want the player pawn to control well in a white room.
Think about any Mario game and remove all of the enemies and all of the bricks
and put Mario in a blank box would Mario still be interesting to make run
around? Mechanically controlling Mario in a white box would still be interesting.
This is the most often overlooked part of game making. Often this is the thing
that makes a bad player pawn. If you really think about it what are you doing
for the vast majority of any game? You’re steering a hit box through a world of
obstacles to reach some kind of goal. If your player pawn handles like a pinto
you might as well leave the game in your garage. I am not all that far in the
design portion but like the art portion design isn’t what is important right
now. I need to get it working with code before I can make it feel good and be
pretty.
Well
that is week one of Project TOE. Next week my wife is going to be done with
teaching and it is the start of her summer vacation. So I can get even more
work done on this project.
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