dario macieira mitchell

Game Design: Starting from nothing

I made this blog so I would be motivated to keep a journal of sorts, but so far I have totally failed to do so.

So let’s see: what do I have to show for the past month?

There should be more art assets, but I created some for the wrong resolution (128×128 instead of 64×64), and I also managed to not save some others before removing the battery from my laptop. I will get around to posting more later.

The past month or so I have been putting my self through a crash course of introductory game design. I’ve been working through a textbook, watching a lot of videos, and most importantly, just going through the source files of Unity projects.

I’m going to list the main resources I’ve used here, mostly for myself.

1. Alex Okita’s great book on Learning C# Programming with Unity 3D
2. Lynda’s Unity 3.5 Essential Training (sort of outta date)
3. A basic prototype of grid movement in Unity 2D
4. Tutorial for Creating a 2D Roguelike, which really helped for learning the 2D side of Unity
5. Paul Metcalf’s very helpful videos on creating a Turn Based tactics game

Not all of these resources are free but you should be able to find them with a little bit of creativity. However, in the end watching videos or reading books only helps so much. To learn you just have to be willing to sit down and play with Unity.

So far one of my problems is that my background is not Object Oriented Programming, and learning to use C# has been conceptually difficult for me. However, the main problem seems to be the scope of my project. At any given point I need to be working on the game engine, the UI, or any of the other art assets I need, all while still learning what I’m doing. Something they don’t tell you is that creating nice games by yourself takes real work and its overwhelming at times. People like Tobias Cornwall make it look easy.

More next week, I promise.