Gaming Week 42: Anna (PC, Mac, Linux)
I’ve always noticed Anna on the Steam store, appearing here and there whenever I boot up my PC, but I never took the time to find out what it was. Eventually, I watched the trailer video and looked through some screenshots, and decided that it was easily worth the couple of quid Steam was asking for, every sale helps to feed a developer right? Well the first time I booted up the game, I was introduced to a screen that wanted my username and password, something I didn’t have and I had no intention of making. Upon pressing cancel, I couldn’t go any further, the game just closed and wouldn’t let me do anything unless I registered or already had a account. This was extremely frustrating, and goes against the first rule of business/game design: don’t annoy the customer. The customer is doing you a favour by buying your product,…
One of my biggest strides in a long time
So I’ve been working on my game today, and I haven’t made any progress in a while, until today that is. I’ve finally been able to make my level randomly generated. I mean it’s rudimentary at the moment, and looks like crap, BUT it’s just a case of art assets not being up to scratch. In theory the logic behind the level generation works and is perfect for what I need. I currently only have 2 levels to choose from, a open field and a forest. My game object travels at a set pace in front of the player, and generates content far enough ahead that the world looks like one continuos level. Once this content is used and goes off screen, it is destroyed and frees up space in the ram. Next I’m going to work on getting the physics of my player set up. Currently the player can…
Shadows!
As you may or may not be aware, I’m using Unity to make my current project as I have experience with the platform from my university dissertation and it’s very easy and fast to get a working prototype up and running. It’s always been my thinking that once I get to a certain point in my game, I would pay for the pro version of Unity, to allow my game to take on a fidelity level similar to that of a PS3 or 360. It seems that’s no longer the case! With unity 4.2, they’ve included hard shadows for free! Take a look: This is fantastic, and allows for my game to finally start taking shape. Every day that I work on it, I get a little bit closer to what I want to produce. It’s amazing.
Expansion
I felt I needed to expand on my idea I put forward to other day, as I didn’t really put across any of the specifics of this project. (mainly because I don’t have specifics yet, just a bunch of ideas!) But here are some pics of what I have planned so far: So my initial idea was to switch between realities so that the world changed, and maybe the physics was different (so the character could jump further/higher). I liked this idea, so decided on 3 different worlds that you chose between; Normal, Future, and 3D. (Which for the moment, don’t have any different physics, but this may change in due time.) My thinking was that you could come across stumbling blocks in one dimension, that would be solved by jumping to another dimension. An example of which I’ve provided below: In this example, the character needs to get to…
My idea
So, these last few days I’ve been wanting to make something from scratch, but I feel the big game I want to make is too advanced for me right now, so I’ve decided to scale it back and make a platformer for now. This platformer will allow me to recall a lot of what I’ve learnt in Unity in the past, but will also allow me to learn some fundamental differences between developing 2 years ago at uni and developing now. So my ideas for the new game are as follows: Game will be a 2D side-scroller, with 3 levels tops. Game will have 3 characters, each with unique abilities that can be swapped between at any time. (Enabling player to jump further, or be immune to a certain enemy.) The game will have 3-4 different types of enemies. There will be lives, a timer, and a progress tracker for…