Tag / Unity

Global Game Jam 2018 Header
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Global Game Jam 2018

Having spent the past 2 months working on both the Microcosm Framework and Super Blasty Blasty V2, I felt that I needed a bit of a change of pace and decided to join in with #GlobalGameJam2018. This was the perfect opportunity to put the framework into action with a fresh project that could be far smaller scope than Super Blasty Blasty V2. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any time on the Friday or Saturday to take part but I wasn’t ready to let that stop me taking part, so on Sunday morning, I set myself a challenge to get something built and “released” in 12 hours.

Needless to say, this was a bit ambitious. But I did it! My initial plan had been to get a fully polished release on the Google Play Store in these 12 hours, looking back this was a ridiculous goal. The version I quote unquote released was far from polished, but it was functional on Android devices and had some great features, mostly thanks to the Microcosm Framework doing its job exceptionally well in saving me development time.

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Header image for the Microcosm Framework
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The Microcosm Framework

Over the course of my past few game development projects, I’ve had to write a lot of code multiple times and every time I’ve been slightly more inconvenienced by it. This ends up wasting valuable time that could be spent doing fun stuff. So I decided enough was enough and I’d create a reusable framework for use with all of my future projects. The premise was simple, I’d outline a set of basic requirements that every project I work on will have and then create a unity package I can import at the start of development to avoid having to try bodge implementations from other projects into a new one.

The initial requirements were simple; a menu system, basic AdMob integration, generic object pooling and simple game management systems to track state/play sounds/etc. These were picked as the requirements because they were the things that I had found the most tedious to set up fresh in every project. However, as I began implementing these features it dawned on me that this limited scope would definitely need to be expanded, what if I wanted Analytics in my games? I would need to first update the framework and then update the package in all subsequent projects it was used in. With the thought of a tedious upgrade process in mind, I went back to the drawing board for my requirements. The final scope was far bigger but added far more value to my future projects, these components and why I chose them are explained in detail below.

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Book Review Post Header
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Mastering Unity 2D Game Development Review

This is my chapter by chapter review of “Mastering Unity 2D Game Development”. I come from a games programming background and have used Unity for several years so I am relatively skilled in using the engine and have been exposed to many programming elements discussed in the book before reading.This prior exposure to complex topics I feel made the book easy to read and progress through, whereas somebody with less experience may find certain topics such as design patterns daunting. The author does try and make these as accessible as possible though.

Chapter 1
This chapter includes a lot of focus on improvements for Unity 4.3 which will no doubt become outdated very quickly (at the time of writing Unity has already released another new version 4.5). It does talk about several new features added in this version (4.3) which is relatively useful. It also describes the mission statement of the book really clearly and introduces the project that will be worked on throughout the book. It also points towards several good websites which can be used to get free assets for any projects readers might be working on.

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