Berzee

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    424

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Berzee

  2. Posted

    Re: video tutorials, this is something I wrote a while ago which expresses how I tend to feel about them :P

     

    For some reason, Unity Tutorials are The Worst Things. Maybe it’s because it’s an IDE in addition to being an engine, and so you get a lot of “how do I zoom?” mixed in with the actual game-crafting examples. Even that doesn’t explain The Internet’s peculiar reluctance to actually write down a text-and-screenshots guide to making a game in Unity. I will share my moderately successful study plan, for the benefit of my many interested readers.

     

    Ordinarily, if you want to learn, your path is clear — you will be gazing slack-jawed at lots of Youtube videos of people showing you how to put trees on terrain *AGAIN* while snuffling into their microphone. The game logic itself may be a set of unexplained script files you can download and paste into your project; if you are lucky, only the last 25% of the video will focus on particle effects.

     

    Clearly this is sub-optimal. A slightly better option is to go in for the official documentation, which eschews actual game-making in favor of stepping through every button and menu option in Unity, one by one.

     

    What does *not* seem to exist is the obvious and desirable route (for me at least) — a web page which describes with text and screenshots, all of the steps that a real person takes as they make a simple game. But combining the following resources, I’ve sort of approximated something of that nature!

     

    But then I found this unity cookie introductory video course which is fairly to-the-point and ends with a long video that has you making a full game-about-a-car, so all was not lost. Gritting my teeth and watching that whole (two hour) series gave me confidence that I understood the basic stuff, so that I could furiously click around in other tutorials without fearing to miss something terribly fundamental.

  3. Posted

    My obsession with creating General Solutions is never so inconvenient as when thinking about branching dialogue trees. It's fun, but boy do you eventually have to lay down some limitations.

    (General Solutions is also who I would put in charge of my army, had I an army).

  4. Posted

    Why do I like the dialogue system from Morrowind (and other older games like Wizardry 8) so much? It makes the conversations harder to navigate, gives you no indication whether an NPC has anything new to say about a topic, and always leaves you wondering if you skipped an important topic by accident. But it feels so much more like talking to a person, especially if you click on topics within the paragraphs based mostly of whether or not they happen to interest you. It feels like Wikipedia. =P

     

    P.S. The old man who gives you the sweet-roll quiz and talks to you like you're eight years old, is the best of all the Bethesda sweet-roll quiz character creator guys. I still can't eat a sweet roll without hearing his voice say "Mmmmwhat do you doooo?"

  5. Posted

    Berzee, that door falling over itself is hilarious. Did you try just making a simple animation for it instead of having it be a rigidbody physics object? So it's just a static collider you animate opening and closing?

     

    Thanks. :D The reason I added physics to the door was to try and make it push back the player instead of clipping through you while in motion (but I think that's all wrapped up with the out-of-the-box FPS Character Controller and thus not worth worrying about until I'm writing my own one of those). After enjoying the comedy for a while, I got it swinging nicely via this codez in the Update loop (which I presently prefer over learning another Unity sub-sub-menu, though I will surely do that eventually =P):

     

    Vector3 hinge = collider.bounds.min;
transform.RotateAround(hinge,new Vector3(0,1,0),90*Time.deltaTime); //rotates at 90 degrees per second

    My experience with the doors was strange because when the door fell out of the wall and onto the ground, it felt like a deliberately silly "see how ramshackle this house is?" event that should have a nice creaking audio clip to go along with it, but I knew it was just a happy accident. In conclusion, I feel now that more games should explore the expressive potential of malfunctioning hinges.

  8. Posted

    A strategy I really want to try for the fun of it is a reverse boarding party.  Mind Control to turn enemy, teleport to bring them over to my ship to a room vented to space, and upgraded doors to keep them there until they die.   Not the most efficient strategy, but it turns FTL into a space horror simulator, only you are playing the villain/monster.  This amuses me.

     

    That would be funny / monstrous -- and also, it makes me think that it would be kind of great if you could then teleport your crew onto the other ship and sail away in that. =P Terribly broken, I'm sure, but kind of great.

     

    I haven't played this new expansion, I really must do that soon.

  9. Posted

    Maybe the further I dig into it, especially with deck-building and arena I'll get more of those back-and-forth games.

     

    That seemed to happen for me -- I would still get the occasional five-game streak where I felt like there was nothing I could do, but after a few days I would more often come away with at least some ideas of how I could have played better or balanced my deck better. It also depends a great deal on how "all or nothing" your build is. When I do get a game that flip-flops a few times throughout, I enjoy it so much that I grossly overuse the "Well Played" button. =T

     

    I don't really mind getting obliterated if it's by something uncommon or unexpected (and I don't mind obliterating people if I do it while trying out some fancy new strategy I thought up). The thing I do mind is when I end up playing against three or four people in a row all using the same class and evidently the same deck. =\ I haven't played in a week or two though because I got randomly sucked back into King's Bounty (which is easier to pause for crying babies =P) so maybe that was a passing phase.

  11. Posted

    I haven't figured out any clever way to do version control with Unity Free yet; but whenever I finish doing something time-consuming or difficult, I (try to =p) remember to copy my Scripts folder (or entire project, if it involved lots of scene editing) to Dropbox or Google Drive or someplace.

     

    Hmm, writing this makes me realize I haven't done anything of the kind in far too long. =P

  12. Posted

    I just wanted to say Super Mario RPG was a great game and one of the larger GAMING REVELATIONS of my youth. Things I liked about it:

     

    -- Minigames that felt like miniature games instead of like minigames.

    -- Sympathetic / ridiculous Bowser as teammate.

    -- Mario being a silent protagonist who expressed his feelings by deliberately faceplanting into the floor on multiple occasions.

    -- Geno (I still think that space-puppet is super cool).

    -- The best Yoshii.

    -- The mentioned turn-based combat with GUI-free timing elements.

    -- It's where I learned the word "bundt".

  15. Posted

    Abandoning Irrlicht for the time being for (being yet another free 3D engine that was) making me think far too much about vertex shaders. T_T I see some of Unity's built-in pathfinding has been made free since I last looked into it, so I may begrudgingly return to some of my Unity projects after all. =P

  16. Posted

    I recently decided to take the 3d graffix engine Irrlicht for a spin (as an alternative to Unity, because using Unity usually makes me feel more like I'm configuring software than writing it =P) and, for the first time in my life, actually did what everyone suggests and made a practice Pong game. =P This marks the first time I've actually finished a 3D game (with musics and victory conditions and everything), and also the first time since college that I've endured C++ linker shenanigans without doing this. ->  (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

     

    It looks 2D because it's using Orthogonal projection, but I know it my heart that it is 3D. :tup:

    pong.jpg

     

    After making this I got to thinking that if ever decided to pour more hours of my life into a 3D Pong game, I would make one where the ball is a Business Worker w/ Suit+Briefcase sprinting across the table, and one of the paddles is a House and one of the paddles is an Office Building, and behind each paddle there is a tall cliff o'er spiky rocks. I would call it WORK-LIFE BALANCE VOLLEY. When the ball goes over the edge it would yell things like "Per your requeeeeest..." (on the office side) or "Oh I already ate supper oooouuut..." (on the home side).

  17. Posted

    But yeah, if you were going to put a person on the path to make his own games for fun, what would be the first step?

     

    My main (and somewhat broad) suggestion is to start out by making browser games. These can be in Unity or Flash or Javascript or whatever, but I think it helps for a few reasons. You don't have to worry very much about compatibility or distribution, and I at least find it easier to keep a game simple & straightforward when I imagine it being loaded in a Firefox tab. =P Also, from the emotional gratification side, you can be reasonably sure at least a few people will actually play the thing. ^_^ Results may vary, but for me seeing the "plays" counter of Kongregate pass 50(!!!) players on my first Flash game was very motivating even though nobody liked it. :D

  18. Posted

    I don't drink the alchohols, but my brother gave me a six-cans-of-beer pack of PBR for my birthday (for a joke, as he knows I don't drink the alcohols, and mainly he just wanted to walk through the door beers-first in homage to the time that happened in The Truman Show) and now I have had these PBRs in my house for months, stowed away up on a shelf inside of a watermelon-colored basket containing also (for some reason) some wadded up trash bags. What are some neat things to do with a PBRs besides ingest them?

  22. Posted

    Another thing you can try (no idea if this will make a difference in your case though) is selecting the object in Blender and pressing CTRL+A  -> "Apply Scale". This will make Blender consider the object, at its current size, to be at a scale of 1.

  23. Posted

    I installed Hearthstone promptly after hearing Nick talk about it. The level of peggle-ness is truly incredible, and combined with enough strategery to also make you feel smart when you win, it is certainly a potent mixture.

     

    But then I wanted to make some client-side texture mods to add more clothes to some of the skimpier outfits on the cards*; discovered that this is 1. probably impossible with my level of science knowledge (thanks Unity) and 2. against the ToS; uninstalled Hearthstone and threw it on the big pile of games I resent for their approach to moddability (also outfits). =T

     

    It was, however, very fun while it lasted. And I agree that having the handful of preset voice commands instead of a full chat system is a good choice for a game like this. (I've played games where there's no chat option at all and it was kind of eerily quiet, but in Hearthstone being able to make your character say their line for "Thanks" or "Oops" or "Threaten" is a good degree of expression for playing a quick game against a randomly selected stranger).

     

    * it's certainly not the most excessive of games by any means in regard to the outfits, but still enough to irk me if I were to get sucked into the vortex and play for a considerable length of time

  24. Posted

    You can paint directly on the 3d model with Blender, it's rather finicky but good enough at least for a preliminary coloring. (Searching for "blender texture paint" or somesuch may turn up useful results).

  25. Posted

    At the risk of making things worse I will also indulge myself in explaining how I think about "by value" or "by reference" types, feel free to ignore if it's useless. =P

     

    Every variable is either a piece of information you have jotted down to remember later, or an Actual Thing which you hold fast in your clutches so that you may manipulate it directly.

     

    Person clyde = new Person(); //this is you; you is an Actual Person (in Unity, I guess it would be an actual GameObject)

int clydesAge = clyde.age;  //this is me asking how old you are, then scribbling it down on a piece of paper labeled "clydesAge"
clydesAge = 2;  //this is me crossing out what I wrote on the paper and writing "clydesAge is 2" -- it doesn't actually turn you into a baby!

Person myVictim = clyde;  //this is me getting voodoo hooks into your Actual Personhood, your VERY BEING!!!
myVictim.age = 2;  //this is me recklessly altering your true properties, thereby turning you into a TINY BABY
clyde.age = 150; //"clyde" is also a reference to your True Self, so now you are DANGEROUSLY ANCIENT

myVictim = new Person(); //this is me turning my fearsome powers on some other unfortunate wretch
                         //but you're not actually safe unless I lose my "clyde" variable