Dinosaursssssss

This piece in Eurogamer from the weekend was interesting. It talks about writing and design in COD4: Modern Warfare and how later games differed from it, and starts to examine how that series has portrayed soldiers over time. Some very interesting thoughts, though it only talks about single player and I imagine one could easily write another article just to tackle the legacy of the multiplayer component. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-11-02-the-seven-year-shadow-left-by-modern-warfare

That was a much better explanation than mine, thanks!

I really like it too. The tones are relaxing and the camera zoom feels good.

Vector3 transform.forward is always (0,0,1), which in 2D is the direction the camera is facing going deeper into your scene. I think what you actually want is...transform.right? or transform.up? I kinda borked this up when I tried to implement it the other day so I can't exactly teach it, but the snippet I pasted ended up fixing things for me.

Yeah, there's also a little "made with 4.6 beta" tag in the bottom right corner of the Unity player. Maybe not a big deal since it seems to be web only and I'd be on iOS. I read on a couple random forum threads that it'd be out this fall, it's just creeps me out a bit that Unity never puts any official release dates out.

Allright I made a tiny game http://maximum-extreme.com/fun-flyer/ edit: Adding a little more detail now that I'm awake... I wanted to add a mechanic where sometimes you'd fly over a hill or a house or some other obstacle, and there would be a person on top. If you flew close to them, they'd get scared and you'd get some extra points. I had art for this, I just barely had time to implement what's already there; in fact, I had to fix a bug at 2:03 to make it playable. All the sprites were set to have the same depth, causing weird behavior; in the editor, I believe they were showing up in the order I added them to the scene, but in the web player, the character was behind the background.

The US version(?) of the 0 hour game jam is tonight http://0hgame.eu/ I think I'm gonna make a flappy bird? I donno. I can't think of anything else I'll be able to get done in an hour at 2am.

I had to do this yesterday and ended up using (more or less) the 1st answer here. This code specifically rotates to the mouse but is easy to change. http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/585035/lookat-2d-equivalent-.html In the past I've also done stuff like use LookAt() normally, then reset the X/Y rotations in the euler angle to 0 (or whatever their starting value was. Anyway, I was about to start working on UI for my game yesterday, but I can't decide if I should be working in the 4.6 beta or not. I'm hoping to release early next year sometime, so I'm concerned that I'll want to release while Unity is still unreleased. Anyone have thoughts on this? My feeling is that probably I should be responsible and use the released UI stuff but I...don't want to, cause it's terrible?

I guess Twitch recently added a 'Game Development' category? http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/29/7091727/twitch-game-development-live I donno if it's new thread worthy, but if people have devs they like to watch, I'd be curious to hear them. This guy, 'binre,' gave a short talk at Boston Indies (a local developer meetup) about streaming development so I've watched his stream a little. I've also been following Dungeonmans for a while now; Jim is really good about talking through what he's doing and engaging with the stream while also being productive. Also he's a nice guy and ya'll should buy his game on Steam (in early access now) if you're into the roguelikes. I've been thinking about streaming some work days after having set everything up for Extra Life, but I don't want anyone to see the garbage code I've been writing. Maybe when things are a little further along, or for a jam or something. Edit: iTween would probably work for this, the first reference link in the youtube video also has a nice chart of the various easing functions and imlementations in a bunch of languages.

BigJKO linked this in the Amateur Game Making thread and I liked it In that talk they also mention this book, which sounds like it could be really interesting http://www.amazon.com/Game-Feel-Designers-Sensation-Kaufmann/dp/0123743281 Also I guess Practice at NYU is coming up in a couple weeks? It's pretty tempting to pick up a ticket and just go now that I have an abundance of free time, but $400 is kinda a lot and I don't have anywhere cheap to stay nearby.

This is a neat talk, I'll have to figure out if there's an easy way to implement some of those smoothing functions in Unity. They mention this book, "Game Feel" by Steve Swink, in that talk, has anyone read that? It sounds really interesting, but it's a little expensive ($40) so I don't really want to just throw money at it.

7 Day FPS is November 8-15 which is pretty soon, and this year there's also a 7 hour version on Nov 1st, which is even sooner. Some cool stuff has come out of 7DFPS, like SUPERHOT, Receiver, and Catlateral Damage; I'm planning on participating, but I'll probably mostly use the jam as an excuse to sit down and learn UE4. http://7dfps.com/2014.php

I try to use Trello but mostly I forget or am lazy, and end up just writing down the first thing I want to do the next day on a piece of paper. In a more professional context I've also used Trac, TestTrack Pro, Jira, and Hansoft. TestTrack was specifically for bugs, the other three could all be used for bugs or tasks. Of those, I liked Jira the most, though they're all pretty heavy duty for solo/small team development.

I have no idea right now what I would use these for, but it's cool as hell that they're available.

Welp, I was laid off from my job on Wednesday, and rather than go through the crushing application process again, I'm electing to graduate from amateur game maker/game-making-support-staff to professional broke-ass indie. My plan is to first port Surfenstein (my Public Domain Jam Unity game) to iOS, then depending on its success, either make a more fleshed out follow up, or shoot to get a smallish PC game out on Steam. I'm cautiously optimistic about this...I think that at this point in my life I have the skills and the network to get this game released and in front of people, but I certainly don't think I'm a better designer than all the other struggling folks out there, and I know nothing about marketing/PR/business so I'm a little scared to be a small business owner. But I have that feeling in my chest, that cavernous yearning somewhere just south-east of my heart, that I need to give this a shot. So, here we are. I'm young, got decent severance, and know I have the support of my friends, family, and of course, the Idle Forums. So I'm gonna give this thing a go! I'll be posting dev logs and such to this tumblr I threw together last night http://fun-ghost.tumblr.com/, so please, join me on this weird adventure, and look for my game in the playtesting thread in hopefully a few weeks.

The butt is now obsolete. "Samsung Uses Robots Shaped Like Butts To Bend-Test Its Phones" http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-butt-robots-2014-10

Allright, got my MaKey MaKey in the mail today. https://vine.co/v/OmVzULOFTlg

Sent! Also congrats to BigJKO, who I'm now incredibly jealous of.

Has anyone tried to make (or found) a semi-reflective and/or translucent glass material/shader that works without Pro? I poked around a little bit today without much luck, the most promising thing I found was Hard Surface Free on the asset store, but it apparently broke in 4.5 and most of the other shaders I've found are from years ago and don't seem to work either.

Has anyone heard of MaKey MaKey? My boss was telling me about it at lunch but hadn't actually bought one yet; basically it's a little circuit board that lets you turn anything that conducts electricity into a PC input. In the demo video they control DDR with 4 buckets of water, play Mario with a banana, and make a banana keyboard. No idea why they like bananas so much but it seems like it'd be a lot of fun to make some weird controllers, so I kinda want to pick one up.

We just put out a big update to our DC Comics themed lords management game, Infinite Crisis. The game's still in beta but this was a pretty significant update, with new characters, graphics/ui updates, balance fixes, AND MORE! I don't actually work on the game (I'm a tools programmer supporting multiple teams) but if you're into Batmans and/or lords management, you should check it out. It's free to play, and the model is pretty similar to League of Legends (though we give you a bunch of lords just for completing the tutorial). www.infinitecrisis.com If you play and end up enjoying it (or already play and enjoy it), I have a handful of point codes kicking around, just PM me and I'll pass one along.

I weirdly got into the industry before I ever really made a game; I had started a couple tiny projects in Java/Flash/Obj-C while I was in school, but never really pursued game development until I'd been working as a tools programmer at a large studio for about 2 years. Between work and industry events, I'm surrounded by smart, creative, motivated people all day, which eventually made me feel a little guilty for not having any cool side projects going. Doing tools work in C# meant I picked up Unity pretty quickly, and I got immediate satisfaction out of banging prototypes out. The speed and flexibility of working on my own is really gratifying compared to the more...let's say deliberate pace of development at work, and it's also a good excuse to work and collaborate with folks who I wouldn't get to normally, and make their ideas come to life. Which is corny as all hell, but completely true. So short answer: it's fun

I followed some people here, also I got some invites if people want them. Kinda feel like I was just getting the hang of how to twitter, but ello supports animated gifs so I'm in. https://ello.co/dinosaurs

A good friend of mine is working as a designer on Don't Starve Together, and last night we got a few people together for the first time to play. We had some technical issues early on and it was getting late, so we weren't able to progress too far, but we still a blast hunting and foraging and stabbing each other to death. They've been doing a weekly stream on Thursday afternoons/evenings (6:30 EST), check it out if you're curious about how the game is going http://www.twitch.tv/kleientertainment Anyway here's a hot exclusive screenshot :

For real though, I've been listening to her newish song Shake It Off and I'm powerless in the face of how goddamn catchy it is